Relevance Theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory devoted to utterance interpretation. Its main assumption is that linguistic communication is guided by the communicative principle of relevance, which states that the addressee is invited to take the speaker’s contribution as optimally relevant. In intracultural communication, the crucial point is to understand how communication succeeds, since its success depends not on a complete linguistic decoding but rather on accessing the relevant contextual assumptions; that is, the assumptions that are closest to the speaker’s informative intention. This chapter’s first aim is to elucidate both how Relevance Theory is included in Grice’s legacy, and how it diverges from Grice. Its second aim is to discuss the place of Relevance Theory in pragmatics today, and more specifically to explore whether Relevance Theory makes different predictions than do neo-Gricean approaches. Its third aim is to give insights into Relevance Theory’s contributions to the intercultural pragmatics agenda, and in particular to discuss how Relevance Theory converges with but also diverges from the intercultural pragmatics paradigm initiated by Kecskes in 2014.

Worldwide communication in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is enacted between people from different linguacultural backgrounds, so it would seem self-evident that it is inter cultural in its very nature. Pragmatically, however, it is not essentially different from “monolingual” / “intracultural” communication. In both cases, participants have to bring their diverse linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions into convergence on common ground. To conceive of this diversity as relating only to different named languages and the cultures associated with them is to disregard the vast variation in linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions that obtains within so-called monolingual communities. So to describe the use of ELF as exceptionally multilingual and intercultural is to misrepresent it as a distinct way of communicating. What makes ELF distinctive, and a significant area of study, is not that it is a different kind of communication, but on the contrary, that it so clearly brings out how communication works in general: since the degree of linguistic and schematic disparity between participants is likely to increase the challenge of convergence, the pragmatic process of achieving convergence will naturally become particularly apparent.