Processing for relevance

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.