When studying ambiguity and superficiality on the Net I dived deep into Pragmatic literature, Paul Grice, Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson, Stephen Levinson… I do not want to involve in the quarrels between the different schools but one of them raised more interest than the others: the school headed by Dan Sperber and Deirde Wilson, both propagators of the Relevance Theory. Maybe you are not at all interested in pragmatics, you should at least have read ‘How do we communicate’, if you want to be considered as an intellectual and not as a farmer or docker – by the way I myself still prefer to be considered as steelworker, I was for a fairly long time anyway. ‘How do we communicate’ is even translated into Dutch and published in Rainbow Pockets[1]. But I will quote from another text now, where Wilson and Sperber define what’s relevant in speech:
“Intuitively, an input (a sight, a sound, an utterance, a memory) is relevant to an individual when it connects with background information he has available to yield conclusions that matter to him: say, by answering a question he had in mind, improving his knowledge on a certain topic, settling a doubt, confirming a suspicion, or correcting a mistaken impression. In relevance-theoretic terms, an input is relevant to an individual when it’s processing in a context of available assumptions yields a positive cognitive effect.” (Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson, 2004)