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"Compare Grice's Conversational Maxims with Sperber and Wilson's Theory of Relevance"
- Words:
- 2812
- Submitted:
- Mon Jun 19 2006

... "Compare Grice's Conversational Maxims with Sperber and Wilson's Theory of Relevance" This essay will compare the conversational maxims of Grice with Sperber and Wilson's Relevance theory, concluding that Grice has the more useful approach, and bodes well for the future of Natural Language Processing. The two theories attempt an analysis of language that goes beyond mere syntax or semantics - to discover the pragmatic meaning conveyed by a sentence, above and beyond the truth-conditional meaning of what is said. Crudely, pragmatics is the process of relating a sentence to the context in which it occurs, the context being either linguistic or non-linguistic. In the former, the meaning of a sentence may depend upon surrounding sentences - both preceding it and those whose meaning may be influenced by the sentence in question. So we might determine the reference of pronouns: Anthony Burgess used to avoid Monday-morning Linguistic lectures. His tutors scarcely saw him all














