Relevance and Bidirectional Optimality Theory

Abstract

According to optimality theoretic semantics (e.g., Hendriks and de Hoop, 2001), there exists a gap between the semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts actually communicated by utterances. How should this gap be filled? The obvious answer (Grice, 1957) seems to be that the hearer should recognize what the speaker thinks that the listener understands. Because this depends in turn, in a circular way, on what the listener thinks that the speaker has in mind, a game-theoretical framework seems natural to account for such situations. Intuitively, what goes on here is a game between a speaker and a hearer, where the former chooses a form to express the intended meaning, and the latter chooses a meaning corresponding to the form. Blutner’s Bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT), based on the assumption that both speaker and hearer optimize their conversational actions seems perfectly suitable to implement this. But how can a hearer recognize the speaker’s intentions? Gricean pragmatics (1975) suggests that she can do so by assuming that the speaker is cooperative and thus obeys the conversational maxims. Sperber and Wilson (1986) have suggested that these four conversational maxims can be reduced to the single principle of optimal relevance. In this chapter I will discuss how far this can be done. I will argue that conversation involves resolving one of the participants’ decision problems.