Enriches and updates relevance theory and explores its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

Introduction: 1. Pragmatics; Part I. Relevance and Meaning: 2. The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon; 3. Truthfulness and relevance; 4. Rhetoric and relevance; 5. A deflationary account of metaphors; 6. Explaining irony; Part II. Explicit and Implicit Communication: 7. Linguistic form and relevance; 8. Pragmatics and time; 9. Recent approaches to bridging: truth, coherence, relevance; 10. Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences; 11. Metarepresentation in linguistic communication; Part III. Cross-disciplinary Themes: 12. Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading; 13. Testing the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance; 14. The why and how of experimental pragmatics; 15. A pragmatic perspective on the evolution of language.

Deirdre Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London and Research Professor at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo.