"It's raining."

Now, we all know what this sentence means, but, uttered by someone on a particular occasion, what would that person actually mean by uttering this? They might mean any of the following, plus, as you will realize, any one of a potentially infinite set of possibilities:

• Please bring the washing in.
• Our picnic will be cancelled.
• Finally, the drought may be over!
• Oh dear, the snow will become all slushy.

In a given context, the hearer calculates the relevance of what the speaker has said. Clearly each one of the 4 "meanings" just mentioned would arise in different contexts.

Here now is a slightly more complicated example, a snippet of dialog taken from a British TV (comedy) program that aired in the late 1970s entitled "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin":

After some good news, two male characters A and B are talking:

A: "Let's celebrate!"

B: "I have some prune wine."

A: "I'd rather celebrate."

It is not easy, or perhaps even all that interesting, to spell out what this conversation means. If we try, though, then we can observe that B intends his contribution of the offer of prune wine to be relevant to the celebration: B accepts that a celebration in a good idea, and takes advantage of the cultural assumption that a celebration calls for some (alcoholic) drink. A's response just focusses on the drink, implying that prune wine may not taste good, and therefore could not be part of a celebration. The scriptwriters' choice of the drink as prune wine is of course deliberate, as this description does not sound particularly appealing.

What is interesting is that the 10-12 words in the conversation require many sentences in exposition if we try to spell out the meaning, and the necessary link in each case is the establishment of the relevance of each successive response.

The idea of Relevance goes back to the foundational work on pragmatics by H. P. Grice (1975), who proposed four "Maxims of Communication"---guidelines which hearers presume that speakers are adhering to. Simplifying slightly, they are:

Quantity: make your contribution just as informative as is required.

Quality: do not give false or unsubstantiated information.

Relation: give relevant information.

Manner: be persipicuous.

Grice showed that communication proceeds by a hearer using these guidelines to interpret what a speaker is presenting, possibly creating implications (or, the formal term, "implicatures"). For example, "There were a million people in that room!" is blatantly false, but assuming that the utterance meets the maxims of Quality and Relation, we can understand that the speaker means that there was an unusually large crowd in the room, relative to the known size of the room. Most importantly, the utterance need not be rejected ("Don't be stupid!"), but is interpreted as being rationally conceived and presented as relevant to the ongoing conversation.

Sperber and Wilson (1995) argued that every aspect of rational and cooperative behavior ascribed by the hearer to the speaker can be thought of in terms of Relevance. Relevance has to be calculated, through assumptions and inferences. This has the consequence that there is no definite amount of information that the hearer can calculate, with that part of the conversation then considered to be over. By adding more contextual assumptions, further relevant implications can be derived. So, a rational speaker will provide enough information for the hearer to be able to calculate the main points that are intended (e.g. the samples in our "It's raining" example above). But it is important to note that there is no such thing as "the meaning" of any utterance, when that utterance is presented in context. Rather, there are some aspects of meaning that are directly asserted, some which are fairly straightforwardly deducible, and others which are more esoteric or context-specific. Needless to say, any kind of communication, including an advertisement, is unsuccessful if the hearer or reader cannot grasp the implied primary components of meaning.

An interesting twist on pragmatic expectations can be seen in 68 Torengos, where the Maxim of Quantity is directly brought in: the advertisement explictly introduces too much information, and then provides the appropriate amount.