Cyberpragmatics

Front matter

Cyberpragmatics Internet-mediated communication in context

Francisco Yus

John Benjamins Publishing Company

CHAPTER 1 Pragmatics, context and relevance Pragmatics and the use of language 1

2. Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory 3 2.1 The code model versus the inferential model 4 2.2 Ostension and intention 4 2.3 Manifestness. Cognitive environments 5 2.4 (Non-demonstrative) inference and deduction 6 2.5 Sources of information in a context 7 2.6 Relevance: Interest (cognitive effects) vs. processing effort 2.7 Presumption of relevance, principle of relevance 10 3. Cyberpragmatics 13 4. Cyberpragmatics, cognition and the Internet 16 CHAPTER 2

The presentation of self in everyday web use

2 3. 4 oN ay

Discourse and sources of identity 21

The (speech) community 24

The virtual community 26

4.1 The linguistic essence of the virtual community 28 4.2 Virtual cognitive environments 30

Towards personal networks of physical-virtual interactions Virtual identity 36

The personal web page 41

The nickname (nick) 42

VI XI vin Cyberpragmatics

CHAPTER 3 Relevance on the web page

The web page genre. Intention and manifestness in the interpretation of a web page 45

61 67

2. Relevance (in information retrieval systems) 50 3. Relevance in the user who is surfing the Net 57

3.1 The role of the “addresser user” and the role

of the “addressee user” 57

3.2 Levels or patterns of interactivity 59

3.3 Availability of information on the Internet and infoxication

3.4 Cognitive effects, mental effort and estimation of relevance 4. Usability: A relevance-theoretic approach 71

4.1 Users and interfaces 72

4.2 Designing for relevance 72 5. Transferring discourses to the Internet: The printed newspaper 76 6. Transferring discourses to the Internet: The printed advertisement CHAPTER 4

Social networks on the Internet: The Web 2.0

KL

Blogs os

11 The blogger's intention 96

12 The blog genre 99

13 The reader’s interpretation 107

1.4 An emphasis on interaction 108

1.5 Communal bonding through blogs 110

Social networking sites on the Internet 111

2.1 Definition, attributes and types 111

2.2 Some theoretical approaches 116

2.3 Profiles, entries and (mutually) manifest information 118 2.4 Adjusting the concepts of “friend” and “friendship” on SNSs The microblog Twitter 135

3.2 Cognitive effects vs. processing effort 137

3.3 Interpreting tweets 143

3.4 Twitter conversations 148

Table of contents

Ix

CHAPTER 5 The virtual conversation 151

2. Chatrooms 151 2.1 Utterance, propositional attitude and audio-visual context 152 2.2 “What is important is to be able to talk” 154 2.3 Compensating for the loss of the audio channel in chat rooms 162 2.4 Compensating for the loss of the visual channel in chat rooms 164 2.5 Oralized written text 174 2.6 Attitudes and emotions in chat rooms 179 3. See you on messenger 188 3.1 Instant messaging compared to other forms of interaction on the Net 188 3.2 Why use instant messaging? 191 3.3 The individual versus the group 192 3.4 Oralized written text in instant messaging 197 4. Chatting in 3D: Advances, avatars and Second Life 198 4.1 Terminological explanation 202 4.2 Identity 204 4.3 Body 205 4.4 Verbal interaction 210 4.5 Nonverbal behaviour 212 5. Videoconferencing and context accessibility 217 CHAPTER 6 You've got mail 219 1. Introduction 219 2. General characteristics of electronic mail 221 2.1 The newsgroup 221 2.2 The e-mail distribution list (Listserv) 224 3. Electronic mail in the oral/written continuum 225 31 Social dynamics 226 3.2 Format 228 3.3 Grammar 235 3.4 Style 236 4. Elements of an electronic message 238

4.1 The (ostensive) call for attention 238 4.2 Thesender 241 x

4.3 The addressee 242

4.4 The e-mail address 244

4.5 The subject line 244

4.6 The body of the message 248 4.7 Thesignature 252

CHAPTER 7 Politeness on the Net 255 1. Introduction 255 2. Some approaches to the study of politeness 261

2.1 (In)direct speech acts and politeness 261

2.2 Politeness in transactional and interactive discourse 263

2.3 Politeness and rudeness 264

2.4 Metalinguistic and linguistic politeness 268

2.5 The context of speech situation 269 3. Brown & Levinsor's model 271

3.1 Parameters for weighing politeness 273

3.2 Face on the Internet 275 4. Politeness and relevance 279

CHAPTER 8 Conclusion: Prospects for cyberpragmatic research 287 1. The oral/written and visual/verbal dichotomy 288 2. The ubiquity of the Internet 289 3. The consolidation of hybrid networks of interactions 291 4. The transference of information from the Internet to the mobile phone 293 The transference of content tothe web 294 6. The consolidation of Web 2.0, participatory culture and user-generated content 295

VI

References 297 Name index 343 Subject index 351

Introduction

This book is the last stage in my proposal of a cognitive pragmatics analysis of Internet-mediated communication and interaction. For this specific approach to communication on the Net, I coined the term cyberpragmatics (Yus 2001a, 2010b). In short, cyberpragmatics aims at applying pragmatics to Internet users’ interactions, specifically cognitive pragmatics and, within that, relevance theory, which has proved to be useful for the explanation of face-to-face communication and also of asynchronous communication, as happens with literature (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995). Today’s Internet-mediated communication typically involves massive exchanges of messages of a written, audio-visual and multimodal quality, and most of them with an oral connotation. This is why typed texts often appear to be hybrids between the stability and rigidity of the written (i.e. typed) text, on the one hand, and the spontaneity and ephemeral quality of speech, on the other.

Although this book adopts an explicitly pragmatic approach, it also mentions other studies on Internet communication insofar as they shed light on the quality of interactions on the Net. But the central theoretical framework will be cognitive pragmatics and specifically relevance theory, as I have already pointed out. Hence, throughout the book there is an underlying certainty that although the Internet might exhibit attributes and strategies that are inherent in this medium, all of them can ultimately be explained within cognitive pragmatics. Communication is a human ability, a human resource and there is no difference between interpreting the messages that we are sent in physical contexts and doing so in virtual scenarios. The only thing that varies is the way communication is achieved, together with the means that human beings have devised to engage in interactions. With the Internet, geographical limitations and lack of physical co-presence are overcome.

The Internet is also a broad field of research with a wide range of research options. In this book several of them are addressed, specifically those that, one way or another, have to do with user-to-user communication on the Net. The book starts with a chapter in which several pragmatic assumptions are commented upon and specifically the theoretical foundations of relevance theory.

The second chapter analyses social gatherings on the Internet and how users present themselves, in Goffman’s sense, in virtual settings. Terms such as virtual community will be analysed and related to their physical counterparts, but this

XII apparently dichotomous approach to community (physical or virtual) is then revised and a more realistic proposal of hybrid personal networks of interactions is proposed (Yus 2007b), with a mixture of physical and virtual properties. This mixture fits today’s increasing tendency to spend an important part of our lives in virtual scenarios. It also affects the notion of identity, which is shaped in different kinds of physical-virtual groupings and interactive environments.

Other forms of self-presentation on the Internet will also be studied in this chapter, for example the traditional personal web page and the nickname (nick), the alter ego of the real person actually typing on the keyboard while interacting on the Net.

The third chapter addresses the quality of the processing of information on web pages or websites. Ever since Tim Berners-Lee devised the “html language” (hypertext markup language)! and its implementation on the web page, most of the communication that takes place on the Internet is “html-based”” Initially, when the Internet was not so popular, there were different applications for retrieving information and surfing the Net. Nowadays, on the contrary, most Internet resources and interactive applications are located on websites, including social networking sites, library catalogues, chat rooms, online games, cybernewspapers, etc.

The chapter starts with the application of terms such as intentionality, cognitive environments and mutual manifestness (typical in relevance-theoretic research) to the apparently uni-directional flow of communication on web pages between authors and readers. Next, I will review relevance-related studies that focus on users’ satisfaction obtained from the information that they retrieve from search engines such as Google. Since this is a “software-user” type of communication, it is not an area that should be covered by a pragmatics of human communication (user-to-user), within which cyberpragmatics is included. However, several studies fitting relevance theory have addressed users’ inferences on the output of these search engines, and these can lead to interesting conclusions on how users obtain positive rewards from the output of the search.? This fact justifies the inclusion of a heading in this book.

Later in the chapter a more genuine aspect of cyberpragmatic research will be analysed: the (ir)relevance of users’ communication using websites, with headings such as the role of “sender users” and “addressee users,” the levels or patterns of interactivity, the management of the vast amount of information available on the Net and the parallel danger of infoxication (mental intoxication due to an excess of

1. Together with his colleagues, he also developed the HTTP protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and the Uniform Resource Locator for websites.

2. See Yus (2000a), thematic section 12, for a list of these relevance-theoretic studies of search engines and information retrieval systems in general.

Introduction XIII information to be processed), which often reduces relevance due to a loss of interest provoked by increased mental effort. In this sense, it will be shown how the web page normally demands some kind of reinterpretation of the two variables on which the estimation of relevance depends, because of this massive availability of information that the Internet offers.

Lastly, in this third chapter there is a section devoted to the term usability and its conceptualization from cognitive pragmatics, and two additional sections on the transference of offline (i.e. printed) discourses to the Internet and the pragmatic consequences of the adaptation of these discourses to the specificity of the Net (screen size, link-mediated structure, scrolling of text, etc.). Specifically, I comment on printed newspapers turned into cybernewspapers and printed advertisements turned into banners and pop-up ads (among other discursive formats).

Chapter four examines forms of interaction that are relatively new in the history of Internet communication but have had tremendous impact on the way people interact on the Internet, that is, the ones under the label of Web 2.0: blogs, social networking sites (such as MySpace, Facebook or Tuenti) and the short-messaging microblog Twitter, which combines typical features of SMS (short messages of up to 140 characters) and a social networking orientation.

The fifth chapter is devoted to virtual synchronous conversations. The chapter starts with an analysis of chat rooms and instant messaging (i.e. Messenger) and their place in the oral-written and visual-verbal dichotomies. Their most interesting feature is what I call oralized written text, that is, the use of several strategies to turn typed text into a more expressive and speech-connoted kind of discourse that allows for the communication, to a certain extent, of the nonverbal behaviour (vocal and visual) that typically accompanies human interactions in situations of physical co-presence and makes it possible to convey not only thoughts, but also the feelings and emotions attached or associated with them in a more effective way.

Chapter five also covers the extension of virtual conversations to virtual worlds where users interact with one another by means of 3D avatars that exhibit a certain ability to convey information nonverbally. Among all the virtual worlds available nowadays, I focus on Second Life. This heading is preceded by an analysis of several proposals to enrich the interactions in chat rooms and instant messaging contextually. Finally, a short heading is devoted to videoconferencing, probably one of the most contextualized means of communication on the Internet nowadays.

Chapter six deals with one of the oldest kinds of Internet communication: electronic mail (e-mail). The chapter is divided into two main sections, one devoted to describing the main features of e-mail, sometimes difficult to place in the oral/written dichotomy; and a second section in which the main elements of an electronic message (sender, addressee, subject line...) are studied with special emphasis on their role in the eventual (un)successful interpretation.

xIv Cyberpragmatics

Chapter seven is devoted to politeness on the Internet. A review of different theories that deal with this topic is proposed and then applied, where possible, to a medium typically prone to exaltation and unrestricted expression of emotions (due to the lack of physical co-presence of the interlocutors) that often lead to rudeness and impoliteness.

Finally, chapter eight suggests future research within cyberpragmatics. It takes into account today’s constant technological advances that facilitate human communication and interaction, as happens, for instance, with the mobile phone. In fact, many of these future research issues include the increasingly important role that the mobile phone plays today for people accessing the Net and the different ways in which Net discourses are produced and interpreted on the computer screen and on the small screen of the mobile phone, with interesting pragmatic consequences.

CHAPTER 1 Pragmatics, context and relevance

L Pragmatics and the use of language

Since prehistoric times, we humans have been fascinated by our ability to use words and transfer our thoughts to other people. In an attempt to understand the special qualities of this gift of language, compared to the sounds produced by animals,! we have always reflected on language, how it is learned, which part of the brain is in charge of producing and interpreting language, and so on.

But it was not until the 20th century when this interest in language, now called linguistics, acquired a truly scientific status. Saussures pioneering research that gave birth to Structuralism and Chomsky’s Generative Grammar placed linguistics on the right track towards the maturity that it exhibits nowadays.

Regardless of this label of science that linguistics deserves, it should be stressed that human language is such a complex phenomenon that in the development of linguistics a number of branches, schools, or perspectives have appeared, which deal with different aspects of language, and often overlap to some extent. Hence, utterance (1) would arouse the interest of linguists according to their different linguistic perspectives, who would draw different conclusions:

(1) The cat is on the mat.

Among many other approaches inside linguistics, a LEXICOLOGIST would analyse the semantic fields of cat and mat and their intersections or overlappings with similar terms like lynx, rug, feline or carpet. By contrast, a linguist specializing in SEMANTICS would be more interested in sentence organization, the referents of the words and how they provide a context-free sense to the whole sentence

1. Indeed, the linguist Charles Hockett proposed in 1960 to restrict the term “human language” only to vocal signs with an arbitrary relationship with their referents (i.e. words), leaving aside nonverbal behaviour such as paralanguage of kinesics. Nowadays, by contrast, many studies have stressed the importance of these apparently marginal aspects of human communication. In Chapter 5 of this book, for example, I will comment on the problems that Internet users face when they try to compensate, in text-based conversations, all the nonverbal connotations that people normally communicate in face-to-face situations and are absent in this kind of interaction on the Net (see Yus 2005a).

(cat - member of feline family, domestic, common, has claws, purrs ...). Finally, a linguist interested in GENERATIVE GRAMMAR would analyse the rules that human beings abide by in the production and interpretation of this grammatically correct sentence.

However, until pragmatics appeared as an alternative approach to linguistic analysis, few linguists had been interested in the meaning of utterance (1), now as (2b), in situation (2a), and with the intended interpretation (2c):

(2) a. [Peter and Mary own a cat which has the habit of sitting on its mat so that its owner knows that it is hungry]. b. Peter (to Mary): “The cat is on the mat.” c. The cat is hungry (go feed the cat, please).

The main contribution of pragmatics is, precisely, the certainty that it is impossible to analyse language outside the context in which it is produced and interpreted. Actually, human beings are rarely (if ever) truly literal when we speak; quite on the contrary, we tend to leave implicit all the information that we guess our interlocutors should be able to obtain by themselves. In other words, speakers base the interpretation that they intend to produce with the utterance (the so-called speaker meaning, opposed to the zero-context sentence meaning) on the interlocutors’ ability to access the necessary information that will enable them to interpret the utterance adequately. An utterance such as (2b) will be misunderstood if Mary is unable to access the contextual information (2a) and derive the interpretation (2c) (she might think that she is merely being informed of the location of the cat). Therefore, pragmatics aims at explaining the role of context in interpretations like (2c) and also, for example, in the incorrect interpretation of utterance (3b) in situation (3a) by a child who, wrongly, chooses the literal interpretation of her mother’s utterance. Pragmatics is also interested in why the answers (4b-e) to the question (4a) are perfectly valid and acceptable although they do not answer the question explicitly:

(3) a. [A child entering a house]. b. Mother: “Wipe your feet, please.” c. [The boy takes off his shoes, full of mud, and carefully rubs his feet against the rug]. (Peccei 1999: 1)

(4) Where is my box of chocolates?

I was hungry.

I’ve got to catch a train.

Where is your slimming plan?

The children were in this room this morning.

(Smith & Wilson 1983: 163)

cao FP

In short, pragmatics is undoubtedly the branch of linguistics that has proved to be most suitable for the analysis of everyday communication, partly because of the lack of interest in context of previous paradigms? such as Structuralism or Generative Grammar (see Yus 1997a:17-18, 2003a). Specifically, in the study of Internet-mediated communication cognitive pragmatics and, more particularly, Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory, can be useful when explaining the role that context plays in the eventual quality of interpretations, which is also the main objective of cyberpragmatics.

However, although pragmatics underlines the importance of context in human communication, this initial movement has evolved into a more diversified approach to language and, inevitably, to an array of pragmatic branches or schools that somehow gives the impression of a certain lack of homogeneity within this paradigm (Nuyts 1987), to the extent that it is even difficult to define pragmatics. Levinson (1983), for example, devoted an entire chapter to this task without arriving at a wholly satisfactory definition. Some possible definitions include “the study of factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others” (Crystal 1987: 120), “the study of how utterances have meanings in situations” (Leech 1983:x), and “the study of how more gets communicated than is said” (Yule 1996: 3).

2. Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory

In this book several pragmatic aspects of Internet-mediated communication are analysed. As the main theoretical framework, I will use Sperber & Wilsor's (henceforth S&W) relevance theory (1986, 1995), a cognitive theory that has made a major contribution to our understanding of how we produce and interpret language. As its name indicates, the underlying hypothesis in this theory is that interpreting stimuli (verbal or nonverbal communicative acts) is subject to an inherently human search for relevance in the information that we process, an aspect that is rooted in human psychology. Under subsequent headings some important tenets of the theory will be commented upon. These will be used later in the description of users’ communicative behaviour on the Internet.3

2. Iam using paradigm in the sense proposed by Thomas Kuhn, that is, as theoretical models that provide scientific foundations and strategies that researchers within the paradigm invariably follow (Kuhn 1975, see Alcaraz Varó 1990).

3. For general comments on this theory see Blakemore (1992), Carston & Powell (2005), Escandell Vidal (1996a), S&W (1987), Vicente (1999), W&S (2002a, 2002b) and Yus (1996a, 1997a: 79-136, 1998a, 2003a, 2006a, 2010a). Bibliographical references of studies that use this theoretical model can be found in Yus (1998b, 2000a).

2.1 The code model versus the inferential model

Traditionally, communication has been regarded as an almost automatic codingdecoding activity, the so-called code model in which the words uttered by the speaker are interpreted in a machine-like way by the interlocutor.4 Needless to say, communication is a much more complicated task and is subject to inferential hypotheses on whose validity there is no guarantee or certainty, what S&W call the inferential model. SkW do not deny the existence of coding in communication (we do use words to communicate our thoughts), but they locate it only at the initial stages of interpretation, and argue that mere coding is insufficient for understanding utterances and, consequently, must be combined with inference. In Wilson’s (1994: 47) words, an inferential approach is needed because utterance interpretation is not a simple matter of decoding, but a fallible process of hypothesis formation and evaluation [...] Because of mismatches in memory and perceptual systems, the hearer may overlook a hypothesis that the speaker thought would be highly salient, or notice a hypothesis that the speaker had overlooked. Misunderstandings occur.5 The aim of a theory of communication is to identify the principles underlying the hearer’s (fallible) choices.

In short, any type of utterance interpretation, either in physical settings (offline communication) or on the Internet, involves an initial stage of decoding of the words (said, typed) and a second stage of turning the schematic identification of these words into fully contextualized propositions that match the sender's intended interpretation.

2.2 Ostension and intention

S&W assume the conceptualization of communication as grounded in intentionality, an approach that can be traced back to researchers such as Grice or Strawson, according to whom it is important to identify the speaker's intention to communicate for a correct interpretation of the utterance. In this sense, S&W propose two kinds of intention, the informative intention (the intention to inform the interlocutor of something) and the communicative intention (the intention to

4. In Sperber’s (1994: 181) words, according to the code model “failures of communication occur when encoding or decoding isnt done properly, or when noise damages the sound signal, or, more significantly, when the codes of the interlocutors are not properly matched [...] If this explanation is correct, then the ability to communicate linguistically shouldn't be described as intelligent at all”

5. See Yus (1998c, 1998d, 1999a, 1999b) for an application of this theory to misunderstandings.

alert the interlocutor to this informative intention). With the latter, the speaker can effectively draw the interlocutor's attention and direct it to his/her intentions. That is, not only the intention to inform is manifest, but mutually manifest to both interlocutors (see next heading). In this case, the stimulus acquires an ostensive quality. In this sense, linguistic communication is very useful because whenever a person talks to us we immediately identify at least his/her communicative intention.

A consequence of this picture of communication is that only the interactions that satisfy both types of intention are worth analysing by pragmatics, while accidental transmissions of information (the ones in which the speaker simply gives off or exudes information without an intentions to communicate) are outside its scope of analysis. For example, in the similar situations (5) and (6), only the latter would deserve pragmatic analysis, even though in both of them inferential operations are performed in order to make sense of the other person's behaviour:

(5) [Tom is walking along a street that leads to the railway station and sees his friend Peter, who is carrying a suitcase. While walking fast, he looks at his watch, worried. Tom infers correctly that Peter is hurrying to catch a train].

(6) [Tom is walking along a street that leads to the railway station and sees his friend Peter, who is carrying a suitcase. Tom crosses the street and waves at him. Peter waves back and, while looking at him, he points at his watch, with a worried expression. Tom infers correctly that Peter is trying to communicate that he is hurrying to catch a train and has no time to talk to him).

2.3 Manifestness. Cognitive environments

People construct different concepts and representations of the world, just as their personal experiences are different. S&W call this array of information cognitive environments, which are formed in the following way: the facts about the world are manifest to a person only if this person is capable of representing them mentally and accepting their representations as valid (S&W 1987: 699). The sum of all facts that are manifest to a person makes up his/her cognitive environment. The total cognitive environment of individuals consists not only of the facts that they know, but also of all the facts that they are capable of knowing at a specific time and place (ibid.).

6. In Yus (1997b, 1998e) a pragmatic verbal-visual model of communication was proposed, made up of sixteen cases, and half of them were devoted to the analysis of (non)verbal behaviours that transfer information with no underlying communicative intention.

S&W propose an extension of the term cognitive environment to assumptions (weaker than facts that are known) and introduce the notion of degrees of manifestness, since every time we identify a stimulus, some assumptions about it are more accessible than others. Needless to say, information that is simply manifest to individuals is weaker than the information that they know and of which they already have a mental representation (S&W 1986: 40). Besides, since manifest information is weaker than known information, they propose the notion of mutual manifestness, which replaces the more traditional term mutual knowledge. According to S&W, mutual manifestness does not have the same limitations as mutual knowledge.

In a nutshell, during conversations the interlocutors are exposed to a great deal of contextual information of a physical and conceptual quality. In this sense, S&W propose the term mutual cognitive environment for the amount of information that is manifest to both interlocutors in a specific situation. Inside this cognitive environment, the information that both interlocutors are aware that they share is called mutually manifest assumptions. Therefore, communication is basically an attempt to make certain information (“a set of assumptions” in relevance-theoretic terminology) mutually manifest to both interlocutors. This applies to any kind of communication including Internet-mediated communication.

2.4 (Non-demonstrative) inference and deduction

In the course of interpreting an utterance, hearers (and Internet users) identify its logical form, that is, the sequence of words that make up the utterance, regardless of context. Then, they construct its propositional form inferentially, together with a hypothesis as to the intended explicit and/or implicated interpretation (explicature and implicature, respectively), and in parallel to the retrieval of the necessary contextual information to obtain the interpretation(s). S&W claim that addressees engage in a mutual parallel adjustment of explicit information, implicated conclusions and context.

Specifically, inference is a mental operation that individuals perform in their assessment of other people’s communicative and informative intentions and on which they base their own utterances. Inference is affected by a number of contextual factors, including the socio-cultural specificity of the speech community to which interlocutors belong:

In order to become a competent speaker of a natural language it is not enough to know a number of rules for grammatical construction, semantic and phonological reference, etc., but it is also necessary to use a wide range of “commonsense” knowledge and inferences and principles about other peoples inner and intentional worlds. (Belinchón et al. 1992: 184)

Inference, then, would fill the gap between the semantic representation of the utterance (context-free, decoded) and what the utterance actually communicates (in context, inferred) (S&W 1987:697). Inference is defined as the process by which an assumption is accepted as true o probably true depending on the truth or probable truth of other assumptions.

S&W defend a model which stresses the role of the addressee when inferring the speaker’s communicative and informative intentions, that is, when generating hypotheses as to the purpose of an utterance. Specifically, they defend a notion of nondemonstrative inference, since there is no way in which we can ensure which cognitive operations lead to a correct inference, nor are there any ways to measure, a priori, the eventual success of the production of inferences: “in demonstrative inference [...] the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusions. In nondemonstrative inference, the truth of the premises merely makes the truth of the conclusions probable” (S&W ibid.: 701).

However, although human inference is not, in a strict sense, logical, it does use deductive rules that individuals apply spontaneously before confirming interpretive hypotheses. Inferential processes work with the individual’s previous mental representations and factual assumptions about the world. Each new inferred stimulus is combined with pre-existing ones in order to modify and improve the general picture of the world that everybody possesses. Deduction would be the result of combining new information P to old information C stored in the persons mind. S&W call this cognitive operation contextualization. This operation may lead to cognitive effects,” which are produced when C is altered in some relevant way, leading to the strengthening, suppression or combination of previous assumptions.

2.5 Sources of information in a context

According to relevance theory, context is a subset of one’s assumptions about the world that is used in the interpretation of stimuli. This entails a dynamic and mental view of context opposed to the traditional and static view of context as “given beforehand” or “taken for granted” that we can find in certain pragmatic research.

7. Initially called contextual effects. In later publications, S&W distinguished between positive and negative cognitive effects, the former being the only ones that are beneficial to the person. Obviously, human beings search for relevance in terms of “positive” cognitive effects. From now on, whenever the term cognitive effects is mentioned in this book, it will mean “positive cognitive effects.”

Context can be divided into a number of informative sources from which the individual can gather information when inferring the speaker's (or Internet users) intended interpretation. For example, the hearer can gather information from previous utterances in the same conversation (the processing of which is still vivid in the hearer’s short-term memory store), from the physical setting, from encyclopaedic knowledge, etc 8 Imagine, for instance, that in situation (7a) the speaker intends to make mutually manifest his intention to be ironic with the utterance (7b):