1. What is relevance theory?

Relevance theory [11] is a cognitive, pragmatic theory based on the underlying model of inferential communication. Human attention and thought "automatically turn toward information which seems relevant: To communicate is to claim someone's attention, hence to communicate is to imply that the information communicated is relevant" [12. P. 697].

Relevance theory is set off against the traditional code model. The latter often is represented as a chain beginning with the speaker's thought which is linguistically encoded and articulated as an acoustic signal which is received as such by the hearer and, after having been linguistically decoded, enters the hearer's mind as received thought (cf. for instance [11. P. 5]. By contrast, relevance theory claims that "communication is achieved not by coding and decoding messages, but by providing evidence for an intended hypothesis about the communicator's intentions" [12. P. 8], which - and here is the fundamental difference between the inferential models and the code models - implies the risk of being misinterpreted whereas decoding procedures guarantee one interpretation only, namely the correct one.

D. Sperber and D.Wilson refer to P. Grice as a forerunner of the inferential theory of communication. P. Grice developed his maxims of conversation, namely that of quality, quantity, relation, and manner, and subordinated them to the Cooperative Principle (СР). The maxims and the СР together explain why communication functions rather smoothly in spite of the fact that communication consists not only of the outspoken, the explicit information but also, and often to a considerable degree, of implicit information. The fact that speakers as well as hearers practically automatically observe the СР as well as the maxims serves as an explanation why implicitly communicated information is interpreted correctly to a rather high degree [6. P. 41-58].

The Gricean approach, however, does not answer all the questions D. Sperber and D. Wilson ask with regard to pragmatic data and the nature of communication. Hence, D. Sperber and D. Wilson begin to develop their own model of relevance in connection with human cognition where P. Grice left off, a model based on conventional and conversational implicature or implication (both terms are used synonymously by D. Sperber and D. Wilson and both mean the process and the result of implying or being implied without being plainly expressed, i.e. implicitly).

Conventional (lexical/semantic) implicatures represent a stable meaning as we find it in presuppositions (e.g. the cat killed the bird —> the bird is dead). The death of the bird is inferred on

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