Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

(Sperber & Wilson, 2002, p. 2), and input is only relevant when processing produces positive effects. Thus, using a nonlinguistic example from Sperber and Wilson (2002), the sight of one's train arriving 2 minutes late holds little pragmatic relevance in contrast to it arriving 30 minutes late, which might require a radical reorganisation of one's day. The cognitive effect, however, is balanced by the processing effort required to achieve the effect. If the processing effort is high, then the relevance of an utterance will be decreased. Thus, there is a balance between gaining a positive effect and expending effort in doing so, which explains why we do find some things relevant, but not all things.

Giora (1997, 1998) has challenged Sperber and Wilson's view of relevance by suggesting it is neither “necessary nor sufficient for text well-formedness” (Giora, 1997, p. 17). She has given examples of texts which appear relevant, in Sperber and Wilson's terms, to an individual but at the same time are incoherent to the same person, and vice —texts which appear irrelevant but can be judged as coherent. Instead, she appeals to the notion of a discourse topic to which all propositions should be relevant. This discourse topic is a prototypical proposition which exemplifies the propositions in the set and “retains the maximum relatedness” with them (Giora, 1985b). Relevance, then, for Giora is when all propositions are relevant to the discourse topic (relevance requirement) and when they conform to the “graded informativeness condition” which requires that “each proposition be more (or at least not less) informative than the one that precedes it” (Giora, 1997, p. 22).

Wilson (1998), in her reply to Giora, noted two related goals of coherence theory: (a) to provide a theory of comprehension and (b) to explain “intuitions of discourse well-formedness” (Wilson, 1998, p. 57). Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, according to Wilson, has goal (a) while Giora's theory targets goal (b). In other words, Giora is working towards a global account of coherence in which propositions look out of the text towards an overarching discourse theme or topic. Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory takes a local approach to coherence in which propositions are related to preceding propositions. In this study, I will adopt Sperber and Wilson's view of relevance because of its adherence to local