Abstract
Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95) is a framework for the study of cognition, proposed mainly to provide a psychologically plausible account for communication. According to relevance theory, words can encode two types of meaning, either conceptual or procedural. The former is “information about the representations to be manipulated” and the latter is “information about how to manipulate them” (Wilson & Sperber 1993: 1). This distinction has evolved so that procedural meaning has been extended considerably to some concept-expressing words, and that conceptual meaning has been extended to some procedure-expressing words. Several challenges (cf. Fraser 2006) have been raised against this view, since the coexistence of conceptual and procedural meanings in the same word may blur the distinction in meanings. However, the present study considers the property of rigidity to be crucial for distinguishing conceptual from procedural meaning. It argues that the fact that some conceptual information can be part of a procedural meaning does not mean that they operate at the same level, but one is embedded, dependent on the other. Moreover, the recent idea that content words encode not only a concept but also an instruction to build it is not a plausible one, since the adjustment of encoded concept is a by-product of processing utterances following the relevance-based comprehension procedure.
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