Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson

Abstract Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson are the co‐founders of relevance theory, one of the most influential programs of research in work on communication and utterance interpretation. This entry first provides brief biographical information and then explains the essentials of relevance theory. Relevance theory aims to provide an explicit account of how utterances are interpreted, grounded in a more general account of human cognition. According to relevance theory, interpretation of utterances is governed by principles that apply to cognition and to communication and is carried out by an inferential heuristic, guided by the hearer's expectations, which yields representations of both explicatures and implicatures. This framework provides explanations of many apparently diverse phenomena in communication. Two are discussed here: verbal irony and lexical pragmatics. Sperber and Wilson distinguish between use of an utterance to represent the speaker's own thoughts and those of another and analyze verbal irony as language use in which the speaker says something that she tacitly attributes to someone else and to which she tacitly expresses a negative (“dissociative”) attitude. Working with Robyn Carston and others, Sperber and Wilson have set out a theory of lexical pragmatics according to which many uses of words express occasion‐specific “ ad hoc concepts.” On this basis, they argue that literal use, loose use, hyperbole, and metaphor form a continuum. This entry concludes with brief remarks on other areas of active research, including experimental pragmatics and work on epistemic vigilance.