78 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
Unless a speaker’s words hold suffi cient interest for the hearer, commun-
ication fails to take place. The hearer is entitled to assume that the speaker’s
message is the most relevant one that could have been produced in the
context in which the interlocutors operate. S&W (ibid. 46–50) argue that
‘human beings are effi cient processing devices’ and, as the concept of
effi ciency is meaningless unless defi ned in terms of a goal, the general goal
of human cognitive effi ciency, for S&W, is to add as much knowledge of
the world to a person’s existing cognitive environment as is realistically
feasible given the available resources. Speech is an ostensive stimulus so
a hearer knows that the speaker is attempting to alter the existing state
of speaker/hearer convergence through the production of a purposeful
ostensive stimulus which functions to either tell or ask.
A problem in interpreting S&W’s theory is that it is diffi cult to decide how
they delimit utterances. It appears that, for them, an utterance must con-
tain one and only one logical presupposition or entailment (ibid. 202).^29
Intonation is not included in their theory though they state that the tonic
accent placement signals the set of available presuppositions (ibid. 209).
An example from Wilson and Sperber (1979: 312) may explain.
(38) You’ve eaten all my APples
Possible Entailments of example (38)
(a) You’ve eaten all my apples
(b) You’ve eaten of someone’s apples
(c) You’ve eaten all of something
(d) You’ve eaten something
(e) You’ve done something
(f) You’ve done something to all my apples
(g) You’ve eaten some quantity of my apples
(h) You’ve eaten all of something of mine
(i) Someone’s eaten all my apples
(j) Something’s happenedThe accenting of the fi nal lexical item means that the speaker has created
a situation where six of the possible logical entailments (marked in bold)
are relevant to the hearer. The speaker fi rst examines the strongest entail-
ment which is (a) and if this is relevant stops there. If it is not relevant the
hearer continues processing in the order (h), (c), (d), (e) and (j) stopping
as soon as the hearer fi nds an entailment that is relevant.
Bolinger (1989: 353), while equating his concept of interest with S&W’s
principle of relevance, points out a number of weaknesses with the theory,