RELEVANCE ASSIGNMENT IN DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION

An informal analysis is given of the notion of “relevance” as used in the description of discourse and discourse comprehension. The analysis is restricted to various kinds of semantic relevance. A distinction is made between relevance at the level of sentences, as it is usually discussed in terms of the opposition of topic and comment, and relevance at the global level of whole texts. In the latter case, relevance is identical with the theme or gist of a text, which is made explicit in terms of macrostructures. At both levels a further distinction is made between “normal” relevance and contrastive or differential relevance. These forms of textual relevance are distinguished from contextual relevance, which is assigned to properties of the text on the basis of the cognitive set (actual knowledge, beliefs, opinions, wishes, attitudes, or tasks) of the reader. Finally, the problem of the cognitive processes and representations involved in these various kinds of relevance assignments is discussed.