Relevance Theory (RT) takes a cognitive-scientific approach to the study of human communication and utterance comprehension, but its roots lie in Grice’s philosophical analysis of speaker’s meaning and his account of “the logic of conversation.” The debt of RT (and of other current pragmatic theories) to Grice’s groundbreaking ideas cannot be overestimated. Work within RT pragmatics has also interacted with, influenced and been influenced by, much other work within the philosophy of language, in particular the multiple issues and concerns that have arisen in debates between advocates of minimalist and of contextualist accounts of truth-conditional semantics. Among the many issues that could be discussed here, I will focus on three in particular: (a) the proper domain of a pragmatic theory; (b) the role of pragmatics in grasping what a speaker explicitly communicates; (c) the priority of word sense conventions or of pragmatics in explaining linguistic communication.

Jary and Kissine examine the meaning of imperative sentences, taking the existing relevance-theoretic semantic analysis, in terms of the desirability and potentiality of the described state of affairs, as their point of departure. In their view, a complete account of the interpretation of imperatives has to explain how they can result in the addressee forming an intention to perform an action, and this requires the theory to make room for ‘action representations’ (in addition to factual representations, such as assumptions). They claim that the imperative form is uniquely specified to interface with such action representations.

The editors provide a brief overview of the interdisciplinary significance of the relevance theory framework, which has developed and deepened considerably since Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson published their ground-breaking monograph Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986. They then provide an overview of the contents of the chapters of the current volume, situating them within this interdisciplinary context (which spans linguistics, philosophy of language, the psychology of language processing and literary studies, among others). Finally, they present the volume as a set of essays to celebrate and honour Deirdre Wilson’s pioneering work in pragmatics.

Ingrid Lossius Falkum uses data from young children’s communicative development to argue that metaphor and metonymy rely on different pragmatic mechanisms. Metaphor and metonymy do have certain characteristics in common: they both target individual words or phrases, they both contribute content to the proposition explicitly expressed, and they both lie on a continuum of literal and figurative uses. However, developmental data suggests that early metonymic uses may be the result of a more basic process than metaphorical uses, one in which the child exploits salient associative relations to compensate for gaps in vocabulary.

Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.

Robyn Carston discusses the relevance-based on-line construction of ad hoc concepts (or occasion-specific senses), which she takes to be the source of much semantic polysemy (where words are stored with a cluster of related senses). In an attempt to give a full account of polysemy, one that marries the pragmatics of word meaning with the demands of grammar, Carston advocates a split view of the lexicon, with one part narrowly linguistic and computational, and the other an ever-evolving store of communicational units.

The editors of the volume asked me to provide a broad overview of the beginnings of relevance theory back in the 1970s, how it has developed over the decades and where I see it moving in the future, reflecting in the process on the collective work that Deirdre Wilson and I initiated and that has been joined and considerably enriched by many others. Here are some personal notes to help address these questions.