Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

Reinhart and Giora's view of coherence is based on a Gricean account of verbal communication. Communication, according to Grice (1975), has at its core a principle of cooperation whereby participants operate under a default assumption of coherence (Bublitz & Lenk, 1999); listening and understanding become a psychological guessing game involving semantic decoding and a search for pragmatic relevance. Utterances for Grice carry both a locutionary force and an illocutionary force. When hearers process an utterance, they must first “decode the sense of the sentence uttered” (Wilson, 1994, p. 39), which involves understanding the propositional content, referents, deictic terms, and so forth. This decoding of the propositional content is an attempt to understand the semantic aspects of the utterance, or the truth-conditional content; that is, “what the speaker intended to say” (p. 41). In addition to this, however, there is also a need for relevance in what is said; that is, “what did the speaker intend to imply” (p. 41). Blakemore (1988) has noted how there is little point in identifying the sense of a proposition if the hearer cannot find the consequence or relevance of the utterance. For example, the utterance My brother lives in New Zealand can be decoded semantically, but it is unlikely that the reader will be able to attach any relevance to the statement given the context of this book in which it is presented. If the utterance is delivered as a unit within a discourse, then a search for relevance can be made since a co-text and context are present. The search essentially answers the question ‘why that now?’ (Bilmes, 1985).

Sperber and Wilson (1995) have outlined a theory of relevance in more detail than perhaps any other scholar since Grice. Their position is based on a fundamental assumption that human cognition is ‘relevance-orientated’. The relevance of an utterance depends on obtaining positive cognitive effects with minimum processing effort. A cognitive effect is a “worthwhile difference to the individual's representation of the world”