Relevance of Leadership Theories to Topics of Nutrition and L... by Widad Akreyi

Both Sperber and Wilson continue to be active in developing the theory. It was initially developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in the late 1970s and 1980s, and has been one of the leading pragmatic theories since then. Turning briefly to the history of the field: relevance theory is grounded in the philosopher Paul Grice’s work on meaning and conversation, and the theoretical advances of the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology. Specific areas of research include lexical pragmatics figurative speech, including metaphor and irony the interpretation of discourse connectives and linguistic items that have non-truth-conditional meaning and the interpretation of logical linguistic items such as and, if. Much research has focused on investigating this linguistic underdetermination and on developing accounts of the interpretation of particular linguistic items and types of utterances. A further fundamental assumption of relevance theory is that linguistically encoded meaning radically underdetermines the content that a speaker intends to convey. Relevance theory claims that what a speaker communicates falls into two classes: explicatures, or propositions that are developments of the logical form of the sentence uttered, and other propositions conveyed, which are implicatures. (This is the communicative principle of relevance.) It further claims that this mandates the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic: a fast and frugal procedure dedicated to processing utterances. Relevance theory claims that this raises a defeasible expectation that the utterance will be “optimally relevant” that is, that it is both relevant enough to be worth processing and as relevant as the speaker is willing and able to make it. Speakers want to be understood, and they therefore tailor their utterances to their audience. Although on this view we have a tendency to seek the greatest possible payoff for the least possible effort, there is no general guarantee that an input to a cognitive process will be relevant. The former is the cognitive principle of relevance: cognition tends to seek maximal relevance, where an input to a cognitive process is more relevant the more positive effects it has on the mind’s representations of the world, and less relevant the greater the effort required to derive them. It makes foundational claims about both cognition in general and utterances and how they are processed in particular.

Relevance theory attempts to provide a psychologically realistic, explicit account of communication.

Relevance of Leadership Theories to Topics of Nutrition and L... by Widad Akreyi