Abstract
One of the basic claims of relevance theory is that because a communicator asks for the attention of the addressee, the addressee is entitled to assume that the communicator is trying to be relevant, and interpret an utterance according to this expectation. This paper addresses the question of what the consequences of this claim are for a model on on-line input processing, and proposes a model in which addressees interpret utterances in accordance with the principle of relevance, by building anticipatory hypotheses about the overall propositional form of the utterance. It is shown how this proposal can account for psycholinguistic findings concerning disambiguation, and for the interpretation of centre embedded sentences.
Highlights
In most existing psycholinguistic models of sentence input processing little or no account is taken of the fact that the use of natural language is a process of interaction between communicator and addressee
Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995) shows that natural language use is more than the use of a 'context-neutral' language with the context added: the choice of a particular utterance is a consequence of the context in which it is uttered
Sperber & Wilson argüe that communicators intend their audience to believe that they are worth paying attention to, and that addressees only pay Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses attention to information which seems relevant to them, so that a communicator will aim at optimal relevance
Summary
In most existing psycholinguistic models of sentence input processing little or no account is taken of the fact that the use of natural language is a process of interaction between communicator and addressee. Sperber & Wilson argüe that communicators intend their audience to believe that they are worth paying attention to, and that addressees only pay Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses attention to information which seems relevant to them, so that a communicator will aim at optimal relevance (i.e. the communicator will aim at causing the addressee to compute an adequate range of contextual effects for a minimal amount of processing effort). It follows from this that a communicator will try to keep processing cost down by accommodating her/his choice of linguistic output to the processing needs of the addressee. A refinement of the notion of 'processing effort' is introduced and it is shown how on the basis of this we can account for experimental findings concerning disambiguation, and for the various degrees of difficulty experienced in processing múltiple centre-embedded sentences
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