Most research into the impacts of climate change concentrates on what would happen at low degrees of change. We know a great deal about best-case scenarios. Thanks to wilful ignorance among policymakers, and the cultural preferences of scientists, worst-case scenarios are much less considered. We know the least about what matters most.

Linguists, philosophers and pragmatists have tended to stay close to those areas of meaning illuminated by semantics and logic. In this chapter we suggest that relevance theory offers a solution to this limiting view. We say a little about the context in which the framework was devised, present the main tenets of the theory itself and then explain the two theoretical advances which form the basis of our belief that it is uniquely positioned to accommodate the communication of affect and emotion. The first of these is the notion of non-conceptual or procedural meaning. The second involves two key innovations in relevance theory which result in theoretical divergences from post-Gricean and Neo-Gricean approaches. In the first of these, the relevance-theoretic informative intention is not characterised as an intention to modify the hearer’s thoughts directly. In the second, relevance theory does not attempt to draw the line Grice drew between showing and meaningNN and recognises both as instances of overt intentional communication. These two innovations result in the theory’s being able to accommodate extremely vague types of communication and, further, demonstrate that communicated information - whether clock-like or cloud-like - can be shown rather than merely meantNN.

There is a broad consensus that human supervision holds the key to sound automated decision-making: if a decision-making policy uses the predictive outputs of a statistical algorithm, but those outputs form only part of a decision that is made ultimately by a human actor, use of those outputs will not (per se) fall foul of the requirements for due process in public and private decision-making. Thus, the focus in academic and judicial spheres has been on making sure that humans are equipped and willing to wield this ultimate decision-making power. Yet, proprietary software obscures the reasons for any given prediction; this is true both for machine learning and deterministic algorithms. And without these reasons, the decision-maker cannot accord appropriate weight to that prediction in their reasoning process. Thus, a policy of using opaque statistical software to make decisions about how to treat others is unjustified, however involved humans are along the way.

Chapter 2 contains a detailed overview of Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. Special attention is given to identifying their respective strengths and weaknesses, particularly with regard to questions about the semantics–pragmatics interface. This will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand and pave the way for a genuine integration of the two theories.

There is an increasing need for international cooperation with respect to trade – to meet the challenges to human health and food security and to deal with climate change, to provide for the greater well-being of the world’s peoples. For conflict-affected countries, integration into the trading system is a path to attaining and then maintaining peace. To be successful in meeting these challenges, much will depend on the external environment – conditions that enable and others that obstruct collaboration. But there is also an environment internal to the trading system, making its institution, the WTO, more fit for purpose by putting into place the necessary reforms.

Chapter 5 opens by asking readers to consider the audience in an informal learning venue. What might those people want from the demonstration that a reader is developing, and what might be most appealing about it? The ideal conversation considers both where the expert, regardless of level, is coming from and where the audience, regardless of goals, is coming from. Brief description of goals that such audiences might have refers to a study of science center visitors. The study identified people looking to feed their general curiosity, people looking to learn about a specific topic, people helping others learn (such as parents or teachers), and people looking for new and fun experiences. Readers are encouraged to look for and embrace these and other differences in whatever public they interact with, which differences can reflect types of venues and local populations. Discussion of two demonstrations exemplifies these points. One demonstration is on the linguistic elements in dinosaur names, and the other is on stressed syllables in Spanish. The chapter also tackles exclusion, as when a museum is unaffordable or signage is monolingual.

Emphasizing readers’ perspectives on the demonstrations that they are developing, Chapter 6 opens by asking readers to describe a time when a phenomenon in their topic area awed or puzzled or amused them. Using reminders of what a free-choice setting is, this chapter emphasizes the importance in such settings of generating an audience’s interest and excitement. As advertisers do, science communicators benefit from quickly accessing positive emotions. Fun, intrigue, and coherence are some ways to do that. The chapter recommends that readers go back to basics by focusing demonstrations on the classic phenomena that all theoretical perspectives agree on; this avoids current and complex debates. The Worked Example finds the basics in a highly technical article on sentence structure in Mayan languages, then uses the Star Wars character Yoda to show one way to illustrate these basics that might be interesting to and accessible for nonexperts.

Emphasizing other people’s perspectives on the demonstrations that readers are developing, Chapter 7 opens by asking readers to imagine specific people who they might encounter in an informal learning setting and to reflect on why those people might care about their topic area and what they might already know about it. The chapter then reviews several examples of connections between language and broader, real-world experiences that many people are likely to have had. One of the advertising examples uses Bounty’s "quicker picker upper" phrase to show morphological processes. One of the cell phone examples uses mistakes in automatic speech recognition to show sociolinguistic comparisons across accents and genders. One of the popular song examples uses mondegreens (or misperceptions of lyrics such as Taylor Swift’s "lonely Starbucks lovers") to show phonotactic regularities. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write down specific ways that people might encounter their demonstration’s central topic in everyday life.

Most research into the impacts of climate change concentrates on what would happen at low degrees of change. We know a great deal about best-case scenarios. Thanks to wilful ignorance among policymakers, and the cultural preferences of scientists, worst-case scenarios are much less considered. We know the least about what matters most.

Language issues have gained a complex and important role in international commercial arbitration. Questions have emerged pertaining to setting the language of arbitration, communication during the arbitral proceedings, and control of arbitral awards. If the parties fail to agree on the language (or languages) of arbitration, and no default language is offered, the actors are facing the question of the “initial language”. Cohabitation of more languages is another relevant problem-pattern - which gained specific weight in ICSID proceedings. Closely related languages give rise to some specific questions. Furthermore, at a time when international contracts are frequently drafted in a language other than the mother tongue of the parties, the question emerges whether the anchor language (the hidden original) may gain any relevance during the scrutiny aiming to discover the true intentions of the parties.

During the process of court control, language issues are also gaining special relevance. Language-based post-award challenges are typically sheltered under the grounds articulated in Article V(1)(b) and Article V(1)(d) of the New York Convention. The focus is usually on a failure (or alleged failure) to follow the language(s) set. Added important dimensions are being shaped through the argument of waiver, and through the issue of relevance.

In this chapter, we discuss how the various assumptions and principles that underlie the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework can be applied to the pragmatic processes and inferential tasks. We begin by introducing relevance as an analytical framework that is based on key assumptions about human cognition and communication. These assumptions have consequences, and they allow us to explain and predict how utterances are interpreted. We see how these consequences play out in a range of examples that are discussed in the rest of the chapter. We start by looking at implicitly communicated meaning, before considering where we might draw the line between implicitly and explicitly communicated meaning. According to relevance theory, inference plays a role, not only in working out what a speaker is implicating, but also in working out what she is explicitly communicating. We then look in more detail at the various inferential processes that contribute to a speaker’s explicit meaning (reference assignment, disambiguation, and pragmatic enrichment), and we think about how a hearer reaches a hypothesis about the speaker’s overall intended meaning.

This chapter argues that Early Career Researchers (ECRs) can contribute to the IPCC in two major ways. First, ECRs can contribute unique skills and competences to the assessment process. Second, ECRs can share the workload with senior researchers and thus enhance the quality of the assessment. By reviewing the IPCC’s Scholarship Programme and the role of Chapter Scientists, this chapter explores the potentials and challenges of introducing ECRs into the IPCC, and for the Panel to engage in capacity building to enhance the quality of the assessment. The review shows how the organisational setup of the Scholarship Programme and the Chapter Scientist role allows the IPCC to informally engage in capacity building without diverting from its mandate that does not include capacity building. Even so, ECRs remains an untapped source of expertise that, through active and strategic work, can contribute to the future development of the IPCC.

Chapter 7 provides a detailed discussion of cognitive context, communication context, and how they interact in conversation.It covers framing and relevance theory, and introduces politeness and facework.

This chapter is about the admissibility of evidence in court as opposed to the adducing of evidence in court. The concept of relevance has a non-legal meaning where it assists in determining an issue or question in a rational manner. Likewise, the fundamental rule in evidence law is that evidence that is relevant is admissible, unless it is excluded by one of the rules of exclusion. Where the evidence is irrelevant, it is inadmissible, and there are no rules of inclusion. Therefore, relevance is the first hurdle in considering whether an item of evidence is to be admitted in court. Relevance is a significant concept that is, and should be, considered when reading about the other topics discussed in this book.

To be admissible, evidence must be relevant to a fact in issue. In other words, the item of evidence must be able to affect the assessment of the probability that the fact in issue exists. Facts in issue are determined by reference to the substantive law. If an item of evidence assists the tribunal of fact to decide the issue rationally, it will be relevant.

In this chapter, I consider the cognitive linguistic, relevance theoretic andgraded salience approaches to utterance interpretation. What they have incommon is that they view indirectness as a graded notion, not defined interms of a relationship between a sentence and a type of SA.