The editors provide a brief overview of the interdisciplinary significance of the relevance theory framework, which has developed and deepened considerably since Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson published their ground-breaking monograph Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986. They then provide an overview of the contents of the chapters of the current volume, situating them within this interdisciplinary context (which spans linguistics, philosophy of language, the psychology of language processing and literary studies, among others). Finally, they present the volume as a set of essays to celebrate and honour Deirdre Wilson’s pioneering work in pragmatics.

Ingrid Lossius Falkum uses data from young children’s communicative development to argue that metaphor and metonymy rely on different pragmatic mechanisms. Metaphor and metonymy do have certain characteristics in common: they both target individual words or phrases, they both contribute content to the proposition explicitly expressed, and they both lie on a continuum of literal and figurative uses. However, developmental data suggests that early metonymic uses may be the result of a more basic process than metaphorical uses, one in which the child exploits salient associative relations to compensate for gaps in vocabulary.

Tomoko Matsui takes a developmental perspective on ironical language use and considers the role of epistemic vigilance and mind-reading mechanisms in children’s understanding of irony. She discusses evidence that indicates that children as old as 9 years may misinterpret instances of irony as deliberate lies and suggests that this is a result of their developing epistemic vigilance mechanisms (specifically, a sensitivity to the truth or falsity of information) together with a not yet fully mature appreciation of how information can achieve relevance.