Explain the (communicative) Principle of Relevance

参考答案: The theory of conversational implicature has opened a new way of explaining the use of language, and caught the attention of linguists immediately. However, there is some inconsistency and redundancy among the CP and its maxims. Sperber and Wilson argue that all Gricean maxims, including the CP itself, should be reduced to a single principle of relevance, which is defined as: Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. In this sense, a complete characterization of communication is that it is ostensive-inferential.
Sperber and Wilson give three definitons of relevance, and the first definition relates it to a context: An assumption is relevant in a context if and only if it has some contextual effect in that context. But relevance is also a comparative concept. Some assumptions may be more relevant than others. So they have improved on the previous definition by adopting an extent-condition format:
Extent condition A: An assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large.
Extent condition B: An assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is small.
With the help of the two conditions above, we can understand why in a normal circumstance the sentence "John went to the bank" means that John went to a money-institution rather than that John went to the bank of a river. "John went to the bank" can be viewed as an ambiguous sentence, which may mean that "John went to a money-institution "or" John went to the bank of a river". But when the sentence is uttered in a normal circumstance, "a money-institution" may be easily associated with "the bank" in our daily life, except that John lived or worked near the bank of a river. Therefore, the effort to understand "the bank" as "a money-institution" is less than as "the bank of a river". In other words, "a money-institution" is more relevant to the specific context in the ostensive communication.
答案解析: [解析] 本题考查关联理论及其应用。Sperber & Wilson简化了格莱斯的那些会话准则，包括CP本身，提出了他们的关联理论(relevance theory)。关联原则认为：每一