Relevanztheorie

Relevanztheorie is a pragmatic theory of communication developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, first published in 1986 and revised in 1995. It proposes that human communication is fundamentally driven by a search for relevance. When people communicate, they aim to produce information that is as relevant as possible to the listener or reader, while minimizing the effort required to process it.

Relevance, according to the theory, is a function of two factors: the cognitive effects achieved by processing an utterance and the effort required to achieve those effects. Greater cognitive effects and less processing effort lead to higher relevance. For instance, if a statement confirms something the listener already knew with little effort, its relevance is low. Conversely, a statement that provides new, significant information with minimal cognitive work is highly relevant.

The theory explains how listeners infer the speaker's intended meaning through a process of relevance realization. Listeners assume that the speaker intends to be relevant and will continue processing information until they reach a satisfactory level of relevance. This allows for the recovery of implied meanings, or implicatures, which are not explicitly stated but are understood due to the assumption of relevance. Relevanztheorie offers an alternative to earlier theories of meaning, such as code-based models, by emphasizing inferential processes rather than direct decoding. It has been influential in linguistics, pragmatics, and cognitive science, providing a framework for understanding communication beyond literal meaning.