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Now let’s move to the first principle of relevance, that is, the cognitive principle of relevance.We will talk about this later.First of all, we should know what is relevance. According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance is a function of cognitive (or contextual) effects and processing effort. Cognitive effects refer to the outcome of...Cognitive assumptions are made based on the logical, encyclopedic and lexical information. Like the preceding text, the observation of the speaker, the cultural or scientific knowledge, common-sense assumptions and so on.Different people have different cognitive structures, therefore, cognitive assumptions vary from person to person.Cognitive effects, in other words, refer to the interaction of new and old information. Then processing effort.... That is to say, in order to understand the discourse, the communicators have to expend some effort to process the informationHere is an example.When we want to know whether the Smiths keep any cats, we may receive the following two replies.Here, a requires less processing effort than b. Both a and b yield the same amount of cognitive effect. But the effect is much more easily obtained from a than b, because the latter has a second, false disjunct to be computed.According to Sperber & Wilson, An input (a sight, a sound, an utterance, a memory) is relevant to an individual when, and only when, its processing in a context of available assumptions yields a positive cognitive effect.Sperber and Wilson define the positive cognitive effect as a cognitive effect that contributes positively to the fulfillment of cognitive functions or goals, to be more specific, it’s a kind of epistemic improvement or an increase in knowledge.Next we will talk about the types of cognitive effects. According to Sperber and Wilson, there are three kinds of ways of relevance between newly presented information and the existing assumption. So three types of contextual effects are created. The processing of new information in a context may(1) combine with an existing assumption to generate contextual implications(2) strengthen an existing assumption(3) contradict and cancel an existing assumptionAs an illustration, suppose that a bus driver is to leave from the bus stop. He sees in his rear-mirror the reflection of a woman carrying a bus pass, trying to cross the road behind him. In this situation, the bus driver’s representation of the world can be the following three ways.First, Given the assumption that if a person is holding a bus pass, then he or she intends to get on a bus. So the bus driver will derive the contextual implication that the women has the intention of getting on his bus.Second, the bus driver’s existing assumption that the woman is trying to get on his bus may be strengthened supported by the assumption that she is carrying a bus pass.Finally, the bus driver’s existing assumption that the woman intends to take his bus is contradicted and eliminated when he sees the woman walk off in the opposite direction after handing the bus pass to someone who is standing by the bus stop.Relevance is a matter of degree. The degree of relevance of an input to an individual is a balance between cognitive effects and processing effort. The degree of relevance is comparative rather than quantitative. The degree is from the maximally relevant to irrelevant.So relevance may be assessed in terms of cognitive effects and processing efforts. (a)Other things being equal, the greater the cognitive effects achieved by processing an input, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. So cognitive effects and the relevance share a positive relationship.(b)Other things being equal, the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. We can see that processing effort and the relevance share an inverse relationship.When similar amounts of effort are required, the effect factor is decisive in determining degrees of relevance, and when similar amounts of effect are available, the effort factor is decisive.As I mentioned in the beginning, according to Sperber and Wilson, cognitive principle of relevance is that Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance.Simply speaking, in human cognition, there is a tendency for communicators to achieve the greatest possible effects for the smallest possible effort.Given this characterization of cognitive principle of relevance, aiming to maximize the relevance of the inputs one processes is simply a matter of making the most efficient use of the available processing resources.Relevance Theory claims that humans do have an automatic tendency to maximize relevance because of the way our cognitive systems have evolved and this is a basic feature of human cognitionAs a result of constant selection pressure towards increasing efficiency, the human cognitive system has developed in such a way that our perceptual mechanisms tend automatically to pick out potentially relevant stimuli, our memory retrievalmechanisms tend automatically to activate potentially relevant assumptions, and our inferential mechanisms tend spontaneously to process them in the most productive way.So, this universal tendency is described in the cognitive principle of relevance.。