to mention
just two recent introductions to cognitive science, Sperber & Wilson make
no attempt to draw parallels between language processing and other
cognitive activities such as visual perception, musical understanding etc,
(although it is not hard to see how Relevance Theory might apply to a
computational theory of vision for example), but in many ways Relevance is
a far more radical rethinking of the nature of central cognitive processes.
Both Jackendoff and Johnson-Laird set out to show how what we know
about language fits in to, and at the same time throws light on, a general
picture of the mind. By contrast, one of the implications of Sperber and
Wilson's book is that a formal theory of communication may cause quite a
considerable rethinking of the nature of language itself.