Publications

Publication details [#10146]

Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber. 1985. On choosing the context for utterance-interpretation. In Allwood, Jens S. and Erland Hjelmquist, eds. Foregrounding background. Doxa. pp. 51–64.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English

Annotation

Interpretation is approached as an inferential process with a goal of maximizing relevance, and relevance is said to increase with numbers of contextual implications and to decline with any increase in amount of processing. On this basis the hearer ca identify the actual context for interpretation from among a range of potential contexts.