Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson) is the best communication theory around

What is it about?

In Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle (Oxford UP 2020) I propose that Sperber en Wilson’s “Relevance Theory/RT” (Sperber & Wilson 1995, Wilson & Sperber 2012) is the best candidate for such a theory. Its basic idea is simple: all communication is rooted in the awareness, shared by communicator and audience, that the communicator tries to be as relevant as possible to that audience. But in its “classic” variety, RT only focuses on verbal face-to-face exchanges between two people, and has virtually nothing to say about mass-communication, which moreover is often visual or multimodal. In my monograph I show how RT can be adapted and expanded to account for this variety of communication. Although the basis of RT is simple, its details are quite complex, and mastering the theory takes a lot of hard thinking and a lot of energy. So I have since 2020 written several papers/chapters in which I try to summarize RT’s central tenets for non-linguists in an accessible way, each time using new visual and multimodal mass-communicative examples. What is new in this paper is that it focuses on five key questions that RT is better equipped to address than other theories. These questions are answered for six case studies in six different genres. One of these, an unpublished cartoon by Marian Kamensky, appears elsewhere in this message.

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Neither in the humanities, nor in the social sciences there is a generally accepted theory of communication. In this paper (and other work) I show how relevance theory can be adapted and expanded into an inclusive theory of communication.

Perspectives