Abstract
Relevance Theory (RT) and Conversation Analysis (CA), two disciplines with a shared interest in the pragmatics of conversation, have interacted very little. This essay shows that they have much in common in their understanding of the nature of context and its progressive construction through a conversation, and should thus be able to benefit from each other's insights into the process of communication. By means of examining the transcript of a broadcast radio-talk back conversation, two points are established. Firstly, CA can helpfully apply insights from RT to its treatment of the cooperative construction of meaning in conversation. And secondly, application of RT does not need to be restricted to fragments of invented conversation but can profitably be extended to the more complex situations of actual language in use.
Highlights
Relevance Theory (RT) and Conversation Analysis (CA), two disciplines with a shared interest inthe pragmatics of conversation, have interacted very little
McKenzie's interest is to argüe that Relevance Theory, a pragmatic account of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses human communication and cognition, offers a better framework for understanding literature than does the deconstructive ("romantic") theory of Paul de Man. It is with a degree of gentle irony that this essay sets out to ask whether Wordsworth's "honourable bigotry", thought of more in terms of methodological rather than aesthetic conservatism, can characterize the relationship between two ways of studying human communication both of which are strongly pragmatic and henee interested in language as it operates in human interaction
Having first examined some of the theoretical connections between Relevance Theory and Conversation Analysis, and fhen applied resources from bofh disciplines to the analysis of an example of real conversation we are in a better position to answer the question with which we began this essay
Summary
RT rejects the code model of communication as inadequate, because there is a radical gap between the propositions communicated and the linguistic forms used to do this (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 27) This gap is filled by an inferential process, the search for optimal relevance. Inferential communication is intrinsically social, not just because it is a form of interaction, and, less trivially, because it exploits and enlarges the scope of basic forms of social cognition Right or wrong, this is a strong sociological claim (Sperber and Wilson, 1999). The forms used draw their meaning-in-use from sociocultural context In both RT and CA, language is not an autonomous code but a tool of communication, and the structure of the verbal signs is only a starting point for the work of understanding. The similarity in this área goes deeper and deserves further attention
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