Relevance Theory as model for analysing visual and multimodal communication

Elaborating on my earlier work (Forceville 1996: chapter 5, 2005, 2009; see also Yus 2008), I will here sketch how discussions of visual and multimodal discourse can be embedded in a more general theory of communication and cognition: Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory/RT (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2004, 2012). The focus of attention will be the visual mode, sometimes accompanied by the written verbal mode, but the idea is that the reasoning developed here is generalizable to other (combinations of) modes. Such a project should benefit both multimodality theory, which urgently needs more rigorous analytic models than have hitherto been proposed for it, and RT, which while claiming to hold for all forms of communication has been mainly applied to its spoken verbal varieties.