If language is viewed as a system pairing expressions and meanings, it is quite reasonable to study language without taking much interest in linguistic communication. However, it is clear that there is a gap between the meanings that a language associates with specific linguistic expressions and the meanings that speakers convey with those expressions. This is shown not just by phenomena like metaphor and irony but also by such matters as reference and vagueness. Knowledge of English does not tell you who is being referred to if someone says ‘The President is deranged’ or what activity is being talked about if someone says ‘I’ve done the living room’. Research over a number of decades has shown that there is in fact a gulf between the two types of meaning. This suggests that a theory of linguistic communication cannot be just a modest appendix to a theory of language, but must be something much more substantial. In 1975 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson set out to develop such a theory. They outlined their Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) approach in Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Sperber & Wilson Reference Sperber and Wilson1986), and they refined it in some important ways in the second edition (Sperber & Wilson Reference Sperber and Wilson1995). But 1995 is a long time ago, so where is Relevance Theory today? The papers in Wilson & Sperber (Reference Wilson and Sperber2012) provide a partial answer to this question, as does Clark’s (Reference Clark2013) textbook. The book under review also helps to answer the question.

As the title makes clear, the book is a Festschrift for Deirdre Wilson. As such, it naturally doesn’t include anything by Wilson, but it includes almost everyone else who has made an important contribution to the theory. It begins with an introduction by the editors, Kate Scott, Billy Clark and Robyn Carston, and chapters by Neil Smith and Dan Sperber, discussing their relation with Wilson’s work. Sperber’s chapter, ‘Personal notes on a shared trajectory’, which among others things highlights the importance of proto-ostension, ‘an encouragement to pay attention to some state of affairs and derive whatever conclusions one wishes from it’ (20), is particularly interesting. The other chapters are divided into three groups: chapters which deal with general questions about ostensive-inferential communication and its cognitive underpinnings, chapters which deal with specific linguistic issues, and chapters which focus on figurative language and the idea of layers of meaning. The chapters are quite short, no more than 13 pages, and some could usefully have been a little longer. They look at many different topics. Some investigate topics that have often been the focus of work in semantics and pragmatics, e.g. noun–noun compounds (Anne Bezuidenhout), factive interpretations (Axel Barceló Aspeitia & Robert Stainton), evidential interpretations (Victoria Escandell-Vidal), pronouns (Anne Reboul), negation (Jacques Moeschler), and modal adverbs (Thorstein Fretheim). Others explore topics that have not received so much attention, e.g. metarepresentational markers (Eun-Ju Noh), adaptations of literary works (Anne Furlong), allegories such as When you walk through a storm hold your head up high (Christoph Unger), and the nature of emotions and emotional communication (Tim Wharton & Claudia Strey). Four chapters focus on aspects of the development of pragmatic abilities: Myrto Grigoroglou & Anna Papafragou, Ingrid Lossius Falkum on metaphor and metonymy in acquisition, Elly Ifantidou on metaphor understanding in a second language, and Tomoko Matsui on irony comprehension in children. In the following paragraphs, I focus on a number of chapters which strike me as particularly interesting because they shed some light on some of the questions that arise about RT.

An obvious question about RT is: how does it relate to other approaches which are concerned with some of the same phenomena, e.g. various kinds of formal pragmatics? My impression is that proponents of RT take little notice of other approaches and that proponents of other approaches take little notice of RT. Sperber asserts in his chapter that ‘most current work in formal pragmatics’ is ‘irrelevant’ to the proper cognitive modelling of the comprehension procedure (16), but he doesn’t elaborate. However, in his chapter, ‘Language processing, relevance and questions’, Richard Breheny considers the relation between RT and formal approaches built around the notion ‘question under discussion’. He notes that the question under discussion position and the RT position are superficially similar, but shows how they are in fact somewhat different, and presents psycholinguistic evidence that favours the RT view. Assuming this is right, at least two questions arise: Could formal pragmatics benefit from placing some RT ideas at its heart? Could RT benefit from formalising its proposals in the way that is standard in formal pragmatics? It would be good to see some discussion of these questions.

Another question that it is natural to ask is: What view of language should the RT view of linguistic communication be combined with? In their chapter, ‘Procedural Syntax’, Eleni Gregoromichelaki & Ruth Kempson offer Dynamic Syntax as a suitable framework to be married to RT pragmatics. They look especially at the ability of speakers to complete other speakers’ utterances and to respond appropriately to the utterance they have just completed. The following dialogue illustrates:

The data is fascinating, but it is not obvious to me that it motivates a procedural view of syntax. On the face of it, production and comprehension involve rather different processes, the former converting ideas into sounds or other signals and the latter converting sounds or other signals into ideas. Moreover, language is involved in other processes such as translation. This has led some, e.g. Sag & Wasow (Reference Sag, Wasow, Borsley and Börjars2011, Reference Sag and Wasow2015), to argue that linguistic knowledge should be neutral between the various processes in which it is employed and hence have a declarative character. Gregoromichelaki & Kempson suggest that the same procedures are somehow involved in both production and comprehension, but it is not clear to me how this is supposed to work. Hence, I am sceptical about the procedural approach of Dynamic Syntax.

In her chapter, ‘Ad hoc concepts, polysemy and the lexicon’, Robyn Carston provides an interesting discussion of semantic change and the development of polysemy, and then seeks to combine RT with a fairly orthodox Chomskyan view of language. To this end, she distinguishes between a communicational lexicon (C-lexicon) and a linguistic lexicon (L-lexicon). The former is ‘a set of reasonably stable associations of particular formal elements (syntactically categorised phonetic/gestural objects) and senses/concepts, tacitly agreed across a community of speakers (i.e. a set of conventions) and used by them as devices of communication’, while the latter is ‘a component of the computational I-language system, and whose listed elements are the basic input to the system of combinatorial principles that generate the formal structures of the language’ (157). This is quite puzzling. Communication typically involves not isolated words but words combined with other words, sometimes in quite complex expressions. But on this picture the elements that are combined by ‘the system of combinatorial principles’ are not the words of the C-lexicon, which are used as ‘devices of communication’, but the elements of the L-lexicon. There is a need for some clarification here. On the face of it, the two lexicons must be linked in some way. The alternative is a single lexicon, whose entries have a variety of properties, some of which may be invisible to some processes. Probably, this view would be favoured by most linguists outside the Chomskyan orthodoxy.

A different view of language is suggested by Diane Blakemore’s chapter, ‘Expressive epithets and expressive small clauses’. Blakemore looks at noun phrases like the bastard and especially clauses like you hero. The latter involve a second person pronoun and a predicative nominal and have an expressive meaning. Thus, You butcher! is fine but You baker! seems quite odd. Moreover, the pronoun may be repeated, as in You hero you!. Thus, these clauses look like a specialised combination of elements with a specialised meaning. As such, they appear problematic for the Minimalist view that complex expressions are the result of a few general mechanisms interacting with relevant lexical items (unless an invisible lexical element is postulated to do all the work). Like the ‘syntactic nuts’ discussed in Culicover (Reference Culicover1999), they look like evidence for some form of construction grammar. Many of the other phenomena explored within RT both here and elsewhere might be seen as pointing in the same direction. This, then, may well be where RT should look for a view of language to connect with.

A further question that should be asked is: How well established are the central tenets of the framework? One strand of criticism involves scepticism about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. Arguments of Fodor, Chomsky, and others lead in this direction. In his chapter, ‘Scientific tractability and Relevance Theory’, Nicholas Allott looks in detail at these arguments, and in my view provides a convincing rebuttal. Thus, if there is a problem with RT, it is not that it is attempting the impossible.

But another chapter argues for a position which may be rather problematic for RT or at least require some major rethinking. This is Mark Jary & Mikhail Kissine’s ‘Mood and the analysis of imperative sentences’. Jary & Kissine argue against the standard RT view of imperatives, in which they communicate the assumption that some state of affairs is desirable. They propose instead that they communicate not an assumption of some kind but an action representation. If they are right, this is an important matter. RT defines relevance in terms of positive cognitive effects, which are factual representations of a certain kind and the product of processes of inference. Jary & Kissine are proposing that positive cognitive effects may also be action representations. This is not a minor revision to the theory since it requires a rethinking of the nature of relevance. Hence, if they are right, this is a matter of considerable importance.

In the preceding paragraphs, I have focused on a small subset of the chapters that make up this volume. Others would no doubt have chosen different chapters to concentrate on. There is a lot here that should be of interest to a variety of readers. The chapters expand the range of phenomena about which RT can offer insights, outline natural extensions of the framework, demonstrate how the framework can shed light on developmental phenomena, and show how it is amenable to investigation through psycholinguistic experimentation. In my view, they make it clear that RT is an interesting and important body of ideas. They give some idea of where RT is now. They also show that there are plenty of unresolved issues and plenty of work to be done.