Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.

The chapter begins by pointing out one particular success of relevance theory: its account of anticipatory processes in language comprehension and of the effects of stress placement on these processes. Richard Breheny aims to build on this by investigating pragmatic processes which anticipate the source of relevance (the intended context) rather than components of linguistic form or content. He reviews recent empirical work on the processing of questions and negation, and draws out its implications for the issue of how the source of relevance is represented in utterance processing. He finds in favour of the relevance-theoretic account and against the currently popular view in formal pragmatics that representations of context take the form of ‘questions under discussion’.