Relevance beyond the implicated proposition

What makes an input worth attending to from the mass of competing stimuli? In relevance-theoretic terms, perceivable experience (an utterance, a sight, a sound, a memory) is relevant to us when it connects with available assumptions to make a worthwhile difference to our representation of the world. For example, the news that “Cardiff orchestra cuts Russian composer from concert” (The Guardian) may make little worthwhile difference to my representation of the world, while “Russia invades Ukraine” (The Guardian) is far more likely to attract my attention, and lead me to compute the consequences (in the form of a range of inferences) that are likely to be most worthwhile for us.

Because all cognitive processing is effortful, an input becomes maximally relevant at the smallest possible processing effort, as predicted by Relevance Theory. The question is: What else, apart from a set of salient contextual assumptions, can impact on the expended processing by accelerating the interpretation process while expanding its rewarding effects?

I present evidence from neurolinguistics suggesting that pragmatic inference involves a series of steps that are not constrained by cognitive processes alone, and I argue that the maximum benefit from the most relevant stimulus available to an individual at a time is not exclusively propositional. The spontaneous formation of assumptions in the process of inference is often interspersed with spontaneous activation of emotions and images, those experiential resources which free up our limited cognitive resources. In defense of this view, I discuss examples of metaphor and mirative evidentials, and how non-propositional objects may be represented in an expanded notion of implicated content which would then be more open-ended and more nuanced than previously thought.