On relevance again: From philosophy of language across ‘pragmatics and power’ to global relevance

Abstract

This paper, largely motivated by Harris (1995), revisits the issue of the Cooperative Principle and, in particular, relevance. I would, firstly, like to note that even before the emergence of empirical pragmatics and critical discourse analysis there had been raised, albeit within a philosophical perspective, some questions relating to language and power and the universality across discourses of the CP. Secondly, I would like to draw attention to the pervasive nature of the maxim of relevance, which, however, needs to be seen at a global level as a forceful social parameter governing linguistic communication or ‘transaction’ and as contingent on typifications of social situations described in terms of cognitive knowledge structures. It is claimed that, just as language is firmly placed within structured social domains or events, so too linguistic behaviour within them is structured and largely predictable as enjoined by the structure of those events and domains, represented in our conceptual world. The paper argues for the postulation of a socially determined supermaxim of Global Relevance, embedded within the actional structure of representations of events. As a consequence, a more complete account of what has been called the Cooperative Principle has to lie at the intersection of a cognitive theory and a social theory of language use.