How Do We Decide What's Relevant in Our Conversations? Relevance Theory

How can we tell what's relevant when we try to work out what other people mean? What can experiments tell us about how much we'll consider when puzzling out meaning? In this week's episode, we talk about relevance theory: how it can help us more scientifically approach relevance in our discussions, how it interacts with the rest of our understanding of the rules of conversations, and how we can play with relevance in experiments to make people more or less likely to behave in logical ways.
This is Topic #61!
This week's tag language: Quechua!
Related topics:
The Rules of Conversation: Gricean Maxims - • Pragmatics and Gricean...
Speaking of Science: Linguistics as a Science - • Linguistics as a Science
Last episode:
The Melody of Feet: Stress in Words - • How Do We Stress Our W...
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Building Common Ground: Shared Worlds in Conversation - • How Do We Create a Sha...
Let's Talk about Sets: Set Theory and Adjectives - • How Do We Build Meanin...
Clues to Meaning: Implicatures, Entailments, and Presuppositions - • Implicatures, Entailme...
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Sources:
The information for this video was largely taken from Ira Noveck and Daniel Sperber's 2006 book entitled Experimental Pragmatics, primarily chapters 1 and 7, and Paul Grice's 1975 paper, Logic and Conversation.
Looking forward to next week!

[@vagalumevolatil]

Absolutely Amazing! I do take a lot of notes so I reduced the speed of the video to 0,75 and was easier for me to take notes (also English is not my first language). Thank you!

[@ethanshih751]

The vivid animations surely help me have a clearer picture of RT! Thanks!

[@murielassmann1641]

I really like your videos, I have finally found a way to explain to my friends what I'm studyin! Thanks for that. I just wanted to say, given that you've been talking about pragmatics, stress, and relevance theory, you could really talk about information structrue more precisely, the way languages use topicalization and focalization structures, for exemple. This is a linguistic topic that everyone can easly understand and I think you can't just miss it in your "pragmatics series". Cheers!

[@thelingspace]

+Muriel Assmann Yeah, this is a good point! And it's a good place to talk about L2 acquisition stuff, too - there's been some really interesting work done on moving between languages that do focus through intonation vs. those that do it through movement, for example. It's definitely a good topic, and we'll cover it for sure. Thanks for the suggestion! Also, I'm really glad you like the videos. Getting people to know what linguistics is and why it's cool is a big part of why we're here. Thanks for the kind words about the channel. ^_^

[@12tone]

Out of curiosity, how did they increase the effort or decrease the effect in the card experiment? The examples you gave for making things easier made sense, but I can't think of any good ways to make it harder.

[@thelingspace]

+12tone Good question! Actually, the default case, where neither effort nor effect were deliberately manipulated by the experimenters, was taken to be the "hard to get right" case. Getting to that inference of having to turn over the blue card is already pretty tricky, what with the doubly negative "no cards with 6s and no red back", and the total lack of any kind of relevant context. The researchers didn't really have to actively do much to push the effort up or the effect down; they were already there, respectively! It was really just a matter of either minimizing the effort, maximizing the effect, doing both, or doing neither. Those last two cases are what we covered in the episode, and they illustrate the idea most clearly, but the first two cases were investigated as well, with the results falling predictably between the two extremes.

[@J3R3MI6]

Love love love The Ling Space! Always excellent content. Great job guys!

[@thelingspace]

+Jeremy Atkins Thanks for the kind words! It's much appreciated. ^_^

[@mariespang]

Thank you for this video, it really helped me understand relevance theory better !

[@channie3169]

I have an exam on this tomorrow and your videos helped me review a semester's worth of material because I, being the genius that I am, left my notes back home. Thanks!! :)

[@ameeral-dabagh6771]

Nice topic to talk about. But unfortunately he talks too fast and I can't make a point. All his lectures are too fast, please slow down when you make a video. not all of us are natives. Thanks

[@thelingspace]

Thanks for the feedback! We do provide captions for these, which hopefully help with the comprehensibility. I'll try to work on talking a bit slower without sounding less into the topic, as well. Let me know if it helps. ^_^

[@ExtraEevee]

you could always slow down the video in the video settings, to 0.75 for example, and turn the captions on, too :)

[@notoriouswhitemoth]

So there's an inverse relationship between the effort it takes to reach a conclusion, and the relevance that conclusion has to the context in people's mind. Interesting.

[@thelingspace]

+notoriouswhitemoth Yep, that's a good way to put it. ^_^

[@kjscott22]

This is an useful video and, in particular, a nice discussion of the Wason selection task. One point of clarification, though -the video seems to suggest that relevance theory is a sub-part of a Gricean approach, which is not the case. The Cooperative Principle and the Maxims do not play a role in relevance theory, and the two approaches are not compatible in this respect.

[@thelingspace]

+Kate Scott Thanks for the comment! And you're right, of course. The researchers make it clear that Relevance Theory stands somewhat in opposition to modern Gricean Pragmatics, and we didn't meant to give the impression that anything else was the case. Unfortunately, there's only so much room in the episode to talk about diverging histories and opposing theories, and coming at it from the notion of Relevance as we'd discussed it before seemed like the best route into the topic. Thanks again for this! ^_^

[@tenderrabbit89]

The "researchers" of the 80s are Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.

[@itnrl_]

What the different between relevance theory and relevance maxim? It's same?

[@TheRealGranted]

Enjoyed the video. I'm just perplexed by "huq ratukama" at the end.

[@thelingspace]

+Grant Smith Glad you liked the video! And every week, we pick a different language to say "see you soon" or the like. This video had Quechua, and hence the "huq ratukama". ^_^

[@ethanshih751]

The doctor example also involves conventional/conversational implicature, according to Grice.

[@mdoerkse]

It took my awhile to understand what you were referring to with the Doctor and companion example. And even after I got it, I still didn't really understand it very well as an example of what you were talking about. Generally I like your videos and I appreciate this channel, but I would advise against using examples that are too obscure to avoid confusion!

[@magomarc1]

Nice video! Try to slow down next time, it´s too fast.

[@itnrl_]

2:35 4:56

[@elderscrollsswimmer4833]

So many words to explain confirmation bias.Play a game: make a rule about some numbers. Write it down put keep hidden from other players. They should try and figure out what the rule is. Give an example of a set that follows it. Answer yes or no when they come up with their own sets according to the rule.

[@anitaeee]

You should cut the music, its distracting and doesnt allow to listen to him well.

[@VerySexyPenguin]

Great show, thanks

[@thelingspace]

+VerySexyPenguin Thanks for the kind words! Glad you liked it. ^_^