Second Language Research 20,3 (2004); pp.

289–302

Relevance Theory, Action Theory and

second language communication
strategies
Susan H. Foster-Cohen The Champion Centre1
and University of Canterbury

The discussion in this article offers a comparison between Relevance

Theory as an account of human communication and Herbert Clark’s
(1996) sociocognitive Action Theory approach. It is argued that the
differences are fundamental and impact analysis of all kinds of nat-
urally occurring communicative data, including that produced by
non-native speakers. The differences are discussed and illustrated
with data from second language communication strategies. It is
suggested that the often fraught interactions between native and
non-native speakers are better captured through a Relevance Theory
approach than through the alternatives.

I Introduction
There is a fundamental difference between those who see the
generation of meaning in human communication as a property
of individuals, and those who see it as a property of dyads and
collectives. Some of the more anthropologically oriented
approaches give the impression that all meaning is social and
cultural. Others give more room to the role of the mind in mean-
ing-making, even while the focus is on the social generation of
meaning. Even accounts of pragmatics that are avowedly cogni-
tive, such as that presented by Herb Clark (Clark, 1996) are none-
theless significantly more on the sociocultural collective side of the
divide than Relevance Theory, which is notably focused on the
internal, individual nature of communication and interpretation.
1
The Champion Centre is administered by the Christchurch Early Intervention Trust.
Address for correspondence: Susan H. Foster-Cohen, The Champion Centre, Private Bag
4708, Burwood Hospital, Christchurch, New Zealand; email: susan@championcentre.org.nz

# Arnold 2004 10.1191=0267658304sr242oa

290 Relevance Theory and Action Theory in CS

I characterize the difference as that between an ‘out there’ vs. ‘in

here’ approach to communicated meaning. The differences run
deep, because not only does an approach such as Clark’s adopt a
more social (‘out there’) approach to meaning than Relevance
Theory, but, relatedly, sees communication itself as a jointly nego-
tiated act between individuals, rather than an individual solution
to a communicative problem in the way Relevance Theory sees it.
Thus, in Relevance Theory the speaker has the problem to solve of
how to produce the least effortful way of getting across the mess-
age he or she wants the hearer to pick up. The hearer has the
problem of having to derive the most easily derivable (and thus
first) relevant interpretation with the smallest amount of effort.
While communication may take place between individuals, each
looks after his or her own resources, and only for extra pay-off
will either speaker or hearer go beyond minimal effort.
Another difference between Relevance Theory and other
approaches to human communication
which may or may not be
related to the ‘out there’ vs. ‘in here’ difference
concerns the
notion of primitives. Relevance Theory is notable for the absence of
taxonomies of communicative acts. As such it is immediately dis-
tinguishable from speech act approaches and all subsequent deriva-
tions of that approach. There are no types of communicative act in
Relevance Theory. There are only speakers and hearers responding
to global primitives (such as explicitness, inference, effort, etc.).
Whether one looks at frameworks such as Clark (1996) or Ninio
and Snow (1996) for children’s pragmatic development, or Levinson
(1992), they are all characterized by shorter or longer lists of prag-
matic acts, activities or events (promises, threats, supporting acts,
head acts, etc.) which Relevance Theory does not, and does not need
to, name in order to account for human communication.
On the crucial assumption (evident throughout this special
issue) that second language behaviour is but one manifestation of
human communicative behaviour, any aspect of second language
communication is amenable to interpretation using a theory of
human communication. And, as LoCastro (2003) has suggested,
Relevance Theory, and Clark’s Action Theory, are worth
considering as accounts of second language behaviour.
 Susan H. Foster-Cohen 291

Communication strategies are, as Bialystok (1990) has pointed

out, used by both native and non-native speakers. Therefore, if
these theories are indeed adequate theories of human communi-
cation, they should be able to provide insight into such strategies.
The interest in strategies is that they are brought to bear in sit-
uations of difficulty for a speaker=hearer, and thus are likely to
show the strains and fractures between speakers and hearers.
Given that second language strategies fail more frequently than
first language ones, they are a particularly good window on the
limits of cooperative communication, and a real test of any theory
of human communication.

II Second language communicative strategies

The study of second language communication strategies has a
decently long history, as attested by works such as Kasper and
Kellerman (1997) and Dörnyei and Scott (1997). Like general the-
ories of human communication, previous research into second lan-
guage communicative strategies can also be characterized as either
‘out there’ socially conceived accounts or ‘in here’ cognitively con-
ceived ones. ‘Out there’ inclined studies include Canale and Swain
(1980) whose notion of strategic competence modified Hymes’
notion of communicative competence. Strategic competence
involves knowing what to do when, or being able to classify
second language situations as requiring particular repertoires of
social behaviour. As I have argued elsewhere (Foster-Cohen,
2001), the Hymesian notion of competence, despite its apparent
connection to the Chomskian, more psycholinguistic notion of
competence, is actually behavioural and social rather than cogni-
tive and internal. Another ‘out there’ approach to communication
strategies, and one more obviously so, is represented by the work
of Wagner and Firth (1997) and Williams et al. (1997), who take
communication strategies as interactional and as evidence of the
negotiation of meaning between individuals.
On the other hand, Tarone (1977) and Faersch and Kasper
(1983) pioneered the analysis of second language communication
strategies as psycholinguistic, thus encouraging an ‘in here’
292 Relevance Theory and Action Theory in CS

account. Bialystok (1994) and the Nijmegen group (Kellerman,

1991; Poulisse, 1993) have since developed the idea of communi-
cation strategies as mental procedures.
So, past discussions of second language communication strat-
egies clearly justify taking a cognitive approach and treating them
as core reflections of an account of human communication. Pre-
vious discussions, however, have not dealt explicitly with the rela-
tive roles of speaker and hearer, focusing almost exclusively on the
second language learner as using either speaker strategies (e.g., cir-
cumlocution) or hearer strategies (e.g., ‘let it slide’). A Relevance
Theory approach, however, requires attention to the relationship
between these roles, and by doing so provides a way forward for
joining the cognitive to the social in ways not attempted by pre-
vious approaches. While arguing this in detail would go beyond
the scope of this article, what is attempted here is an evaluation of
Relevance Theory as an account of communicative strategies. This
is done by contrasting Relevance Theory with the approach of
Clark (1996) as a way of exploring the appropriate nature of a
cognitive account of human communication in general and second
language communicative behaviour in particular.

III Sperber and Wilson (1986=95) vs. Clark (1996)

There are a number of points on which Sperber and Wilson
(1986=95) and Clark (1996) clearly agree, and these should be
stated at the outset. The first is that face-to-face conversational
behaviour lies at the core of a theory of language use. It is this
sort of ordinary behaviour that needs to be accounted for. Perhaps
this is an unremarkable point, although LoCastro (2003) seems to
buy into the belief that neither theory deals with natural data,
assuming instead an unnecessary critical attitude towards so-called
‘constructed’ examples. Focus on ordinary conversation is impor-
tant to stress, however, because speech act approaches rest on, and
therefore risk inheriting, a view of language based on special
speech acts, many of which are far from ordinary face-to-face con-
versational behaviour. Austin’s insight that communication was an
act at all was predicated on noting the power of such institutional
and special acts as sentencing and marrying. As Sperber and
 Susan H. Foster-Cohen 293

Wilson (1986/95) have argued, these should be understood as

extremely peripheral acts, however, and should not be used to justify
naming every act of communication as if it were special in some
way (promising, apologizing, threatening, warning, etc.). This path
leads to a proliferation of taxonomies of the kind I have already
alluded to critically.
Both Sperber and Wilson (1986=95) and Clark (1996) agree that
language, while a frequently privileged form of communication
because of its special features of allowing complexity in messages,
delay in communicating, ability to convey a message through a
variety of media, etc., is only one aspect of communication. Non-
verbal, pictorial, musical and other forms of communication are
also part of face-to-face conversational communication, and must
not be left out of the account. Recent work by Gullberg and
Holmqvist (1999) and others is beginning to give a much clearer
picture of the role of non-verbal communication in second lan-
guage contexts. Again, there seems to be considerable misunder-
standing on this point among those quick to criticize Relevance
Theory. The Communicative Principle of Relevance governs any
deliberate communication, linguistic or not. In fact, Sperber and
Wilson (1995: 48
51) contains an extended example based on an
individual’s leaning back so that the person next to them can see
another person approaching. A message is communicated with no
language at all. When language is used, however, it is regarded as
coding part of the message, and this must be decoded by the fast
and domain specific mechanisms that psycholinguistic and neuro-
linguistic studies demonstrate are operative. It is, therefore, unfairly
critical to suggest, as LoCastro (2003) does, that Relevance Theory.

prioritizes analysis of the linguistic constituents and, moreover, maintains a

distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge. Emphasis on the
linguistic forms locates the approach within the modular view of language.
Relevance Theory is consequently consistent with Chomsky’s generative model of
language, which uses reified, created sentences of the linguist for data. (LoCastro,
2003: 183)

Relevance Theory does not prioritize linguistic constituents, except

in that there is more to say about how language plays its part in
communication than about non-verbal communication. It main-
tains a distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge
294 Relevance Theory and Action Theory in CS

in the sense that most current models of brain and language do,
and therefore does endorse a modular account, for which it needs
to make no apology. And like all good theories, it uses multiple
sources of data to develop its ideas, which, again, requires no
apology.
A third point of agreement between the two approaches con-
cerns the recognition that all interlocutors have a preference for
least effort. This fact has been noted in a number of different
approaches and has been supported by psycholinguistic exper-
imentation, including the work of Ying (this issue). While the
appeal to a least effort principle does not characterize Relevance
Theory in contradistinction to Clark, the attempt to articulate the
balance between effort and effect does receive specific attention in
Relevance Theory.
A final point of agreement is that all interpretation of comm-
unicative signals for both Sperber and Wilson (1986=95) and
Clark (1996) takes place in a mental context which includes the
internalization of the physical=social context in which the speaker
operates, or has operated at some time in the past. It is this that
makes Clark’s approach a worthy point of comparison with
Relevance Theory, and I have more to say about the social context
in Relevance Theory below. Here it suffices to say that both
Relevance Theory and Action Theory are cognitive approaches to
human communication, even while they differ in some crucial
respects.
The key difference between the two approaches is that Rel-
evance Theory takes an individual perspective, while Clark takes a
dyadic or social perspective. All other differences stem from this
one difference of starting point. Because Clark takes a social=
dyadic approach, he sees language use as a form of joint action
towards a joint goal that emerges like a duet between cooperative
speaker=hearers. That meaning is socially constructed is clear from
the following:
The notion ‘what the speaker means’ [must be] replaced by ‘what the speaker is
taken to mean’. . .The idea is that speakers and addressees try to create a joint
construal of what the speaker is to be taken to mean. . .what the participants
mutually take the speaker as meaning, what they deem the speaker to mean.
(Clark, 1996: 212)
 Susan H. Foster-Cohen 295

As we see below, this implies that a frustrated second language

speaker attempting to move beyond his or her current capacity
cannot be seen as having a message to convey that is misunder-
stood or only partially understood. Rather, the speaker’s meaning
can only be what is actually conveyed to the hearer in a joint act
of meaning making. Such an approach is completely different from
Relevance Theory.
Relevance Theory sees language use as a form of individual
problem-solving (which may fail), driven not by a joint goal, but
by the speaker’s desire to have a hearer understand and a hearer’s
assumption that a relevant interpretation is derivable and worth
the effort. It is worth noting here that LoCastro (2003: 185) has
missed the point when she criticizes Relevance Theory for not
using probabilistic or deductive reasoning. Sperber and Wilson’s
point is precisely that hearers come to firm conclusions about
interpretations and then abandon the effort. They may come to
wrong ones, but they do not spend time holding a range of poss-
ible interpretations in mind, unless there are reasons to do so.
In Relevance Theory there is no assumption that speakers and
hearers are being deliberately cooperative or that what they do
emerges like a duet (Clark’s metaphor) in which neither partner is
doing anything at all without the other. Sperber and Wilson’s
metaphor is ballroom dancing, where there is a leader (the
speaker) and a follower (the hearer). This is not to deny that joint
goals may emerge or that speakers and hearers may agree to
compromise in any of a variety of different ways; but this is not
what drives interaction within Relevance Theory:
It may be true that in most verbal exchanges the participants share a purpose
that goes beyond merely understanding one another, but it need not always be
the case. Conflictual or non-reciprocal communication, for example, involves no
such purpose. The existence of a common conversational goal need not be built
into pragmatic principles. (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 268)

LoCastro (2003) has suggested that both Relevance Theory and

Action Theory have yet to be supported by empirical research
using naturally occurring language in everyday environments. This
is actually false, as this issue of Second Language Research attests.
However, rather than simply protest, in what follows I want to
296 Relevance Theory and Action Theory in CS

demonstrate how each theory would approach naturally occurring

second language data.

IV Testing the differences

The first piece of data comes from Selinker and Douglas (1985),
reproduced in Gass and Selinker (1994). Selinker and Douglas used
it to argue that learners’ non-native behaviours are to some extent
conditioned by the discourse context. Learners may use different
communication strategies in different contexts. In the example
below, their interest was in how Luis responds to his inability to
recall a specific word. I, however, want to use this episode to raise
issues about problem-solving, joint goals and cooperation.

L: I don’t know if you know what machaca is

I: tell me
I
think I’ve had it once before
L: No
you you get some meat and you put that meat eh to
the sun an after that you
I don’t know what is I
I
learned that name because I went to the sss
Farmer Jack
I saw that
you make like a little then
oh my god

then you ¼ you ¼ forget it (laugh)
I: (laugh) make it into strips?
L: OK like a
you you have a steak no? you first
I: uh huh
L: in the sun
you have
I: then it gets rotten and you throw
it away
L: ummm
no no no no no only one day or two days
I: um hmmmm
L: after that with a stone you like escramble that like ah

I: you grind it up?
L: yes that psss you you start to what is that word oh my god
I: mash?
L: exactly you have to you start making mash that meat.

Selinker and Douglas (1985) and Gass and Selinker (1994) see
this exchange as ‘a negotiated interaction with the interviewer,
 Susan H. Foster-Cohen 297

resulting in a mutual word search. That is, both conversational

participants have as their goal the search for the appropriate lexi-
cal item’ (Gass and Selinker, 1994: 179). This is clearly a Clarkian
interpretation. What would a Relevance Theory interpretation
look like?
First, is this the joint solution to a word-finding problem, or is
it individual problem-solving in which Luis tries a variety of strat-
egies to deal with the missing word? He works very hard, paying
little attention to the interviewer as he casts around for ways to
deal with his difficulty. He tries to describe the process, he tries to
abandon the effort ( forget it), he uses a word (escramble) which is
semantically close and possibly involves transfer from Spanish. He
does not seek help, and he is working so hard, that he appears not
to take in the rather mean joke on the part of the interviewer
about throwing the meat away. I would suggest there is at least as
much evidence that Luis is engaging in individual problem-solving
as evidence that he and the interviewer are engaged in joint
problem-solving.
What about the goals of this interaction? Clark would say, as
Selinker and colleagues do, that the goal of both participants is
the search for the word. However, how do we know this? Is it not
at least as likely that the goal of the interviewer is to get enough
speech from Luis to get a usable transcript, perhaps for assessment
purposes? Perhaps the goal of both participants is to get enough
data for assessment or for research. Perhaps we could say the
interviewer’s goal is to have a conversation with a non-native
speaker, or to allow Luis to demonstrate his competence in Eng-
lish. How could we possibly know what the goals of Luis and the
interviewer are either separately or together? One way would be to
ask them, a point I return to below. But just looking at the data,
there seems little way of knowing.
Is this interaction based on the individual or the dyad? Is it self-
ish or cooperative? Again, there seems to be easily as much
evidence of selfishness as cooperation. The interviewer makes what
could easily be seen as a cruel joke at Luis’s expense, which Luis
does not appear to ‘get’. The interviewer does not answer Luis’s
initial question (I don’t know if you know what machaca is) directly,
298 Relevance Theory and Action Theory in CS

but gives an equivocal answer that seems to imply both that he

does and does not know what it is, and is more interested in Luis’s
talking than in what he has to say (see above). Luis also goes on
looking for his word (mash) after the interviewer has offered
another (grind). True cooperation and joint goals might suggest
Luis would abandon his effort to solve his problem and settle for
the related word offered. Instead, he makes his interlocutor do
more work, and does more work himself, in order to achieve a
better solution to his problem. Presumably, he feels the extra effort
is worth the payoff of finding a better match in English for the
word he is seeking. Again, making the assumption that human
communication is cooperative does not provide an easy analysis of
these aspects of this conversation.
Determining the thoughts, goals, and judgements of speakers
and hearers is never easy, even while we engage in doing it in
every interaction we have. We work as hard as participants as we
do as analysts to determine the message. We may always fail (our
deductions are non-demonstrative), but we engage in them any-
way. As analysts armed with tape recorders we can sometimes go
further, and request retrospective commentaries on interactions.
Sorace et al. (1994) provide a number of such examples, of which
one is reproduced below. The data come from a game in which the
non-native speaker draws an object out of a bag without letting
the native speaker interlocutor see it. The native speaker has to
guess what the object is by posing questions. Here is an example.

Excerpt 1: Non-native speaker knows what the item is

Native speaker: Does it make a noise?
Non-native speaker: Noise (softly)
Native speaker: Noise (softly)
Non-native speaker: No . . . No (softly)
Native speaker: No. Uhm, is it sharp?
(Sorace et al., 1994: 23)
In discussion afterwards, the following exchange occurred:

Non-native speaker: Noise
that I didn’t understand.

Researcher: Why did you say ‘no’ if you didn’t under-
stand the word?
 Susan H. Foster-Cohen 299

Non-native speaker: Because I thought that she wouldn’t be

able to explain. There are some words

it’s rare that a person can explain them.
Native speaker: I didn’t think she understood ‘noise’.
Researcher: Why do you think she said ‘no’ then?
Native speaker: Just to be safe. But I really don’t think she
understood.
Researcher: Why didn’t you pursue it then?
Native speaker: Hmmmmm. I don’t know. (p. 25)

This is a game in which the main task is to use questions, to use

specific vocabulary and to come to an understanding of what the
object is. And yet, the native speaker lets an obvious lack of
understanding go unremarked upon, and the non-native speaker
answers the question as if she did understand, knowing she did
not, because she made an estimate of the ease for the native
speaker of coming up with a definition. There is multiple ‘mind-
reading’ going on here, but very little evidence of a joint goal,
unless the goal is to preserve the face of each participant.
However, if one is allowed to come up with anything that works
in response to any piece of data, then the notion of joint goal
seems ever more bankrupt.
This example does, however, raise one last point of comparison
between the two approaches to be examined here. The retrospec-
tive discussion above reflects a feature very common to inter-
actions involving non-native speakers, namely metalinguistic talk.
In the above example, the topic of the conversation was meta-
linguistic. On other occasions, such as Luis’s what is that word, it
may be more in passing. In Relevance Theory, metalinguistic talk
is regarded as just one kind of information carried by the language
and=or non-verbal aspects of the communication. Clark, on the
other hand, relegates all metalinguistic talk to a separate ‘col-
lateral track’. Intended largely for the fillers, hesitation markers
and back-channel cues that Clark has made the focus of study in
recent years, it would also mean than in a conversation where the
topic is metalinguistic, the entire conversation would be on the
collateral track, with nothing left on the main track. This would
seem to be a genuine problem with Clark’s approach. A similar
300 Relevance Theory and Action Theory in CS

problem arises for Clark with non-literal talk which is placed on a

separate level of action
one of joint pretense
from literal talk.
Relevance Theory, on the other hand, treats non-literal talk as
unremarkable, absorbing it into the general nature of talk as
inexact in various ways. Again, Relevance Theory would seem the
more parsimonious approach, requiring little taxonomy and more
reliance on a few basic principles.
Finally, let us take a brief look at how social information is
incorporated into the Relevance Theory approach. Mey (1993) has
argued that Relevance Theory pays no attention to the socio-
cultural dimensions of language use. This is simply false.
Relevance Theory pays as much attention to sociocultural dimen-
sions as speakers and hearers do. Speakers and hearers notice and
store any and all relevant information about others as they inter-
act with them. Over time, this will mean they come to recognize
features of social class, ethnic identity, power, solidarity, polite-
ness, etc. in individuals through their behaviour: way of talking,
moving, being. This sort of information is simply stored in the
accessible mental context like any other. Brown and Yule (1983:
225, cited in LoCastro, 2003) clamed that the mind must
accomplish three tasks: computing the communicative function of
the utterance, incorporating sociocultural knowledge and deter-
mining inferences. Relevance Theory does not see these as three
separate tasks. They are all accomplished simultaneously in the act
of comprehension. There is no need to separate them out in this
way. They are all part of the same task.

V Conclusion
The discussion above has attempted to suggest that Sperber and
Wilson’s Relevance Theory accounts well for communication
strategies, and that it does it better than Clark’s approach.

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