The Function of Relevance Theory in Understanding Conversational Implicature in Intercultural Communication

Sperber Wilson view communication as a cognitive activity. Their Relevance Theory is trying to discover the laws of communication according to human's cognitive features. It questions and improves Grice's Cooperative Principle in the aspect of pragmatic inference of conversational implicature in intercultural communication and discusses the polite phenomena in communication from the angle of cognition, then offers a new theory for understanding the utterances in intercultural communication. Therefore, Relevance Theory is helpful for us to understand and illustrate the phenomena of pragmatic misuse and communication failure in intercultural verbal communication.