This chapter considers the treatment of context in relevance theory, a cognitively oriented pragmatic theory which sees human communication and cognition as governed by the search for relevance. Utterance interpretation crucially relies on context, and a central question for pragmatics is about how hearers find the right contextual information to use in interpreting an utterance, and thus succeed in identifying the speaker’s meaning. According to relevance theory, utterances raise precise and predictable expectations of relevance which guide the hearer in every aspect of utterance interpretation, from disambiguation and reference resolution to the choice of contextual information and the derivation of implicatures (i.e. intended implications). After outlining the main assumptions of Relevance Theory, the chapter illustrates with examples how these different aspects of interpretation fit together, and compares Relevance Theory’s treatment of context with some alternative treatments discussed in the pragmatic literature, including those based on a notion of “common ground.”

In this chapter, we introduce the main ideas behind relevance theory. We begin by considering how it developed out of the Gricean approach to pragmatics, and we look at how it differs from that approach. Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory of how we process utterances (and information) in context. The chapter begins with a discussion of relevance and cognition, and we outline the relevance-theoretic characterisation of context. This then leads us to a definition of what it means for something to be relevant, and we introduce the two principles which drive the relevance-theoretic approach to utterance interpretation. When information is intentionally communicated (both in utterances and in other forms of communication), we say it is ostensive. Ostensive communication is, according to relevance theory, special. It raises expectations of how relevant it will be for the addressee, and this has important consequences for how we process information and how we understand utterance interpretation. We will see that this leads us to the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure which describes how we go about processing intentionally communicated information.