i do not propose to give yet another outline of relevance theory here, but there are some central points to bear in mind. A basic claim of the that human cognitive activity by the goal of maximising relevance: that is, of deploying its information processing resources in such a way as to derive as great a range of contextual effects ( contextual implication, strengthenings, and eliminnations) as possible for the least expenditure of effort. This is what motivates us at any given moment to pay attention to some phenomena rather than to other. We are generally willing to attend to utterances because an utterance comes with the presumption that it will afford into the hearer's while to turn his attention to it. He will of course have to put some effort into processing it : decoding its linguistic content, accessing a context of assumptions to interact with it, and computing its effects on that context. the