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A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 33

cept of communicative intention is important, because people generally pay at-
tention to those phenomena which are evidently produced with the intention to
convey information. For example, we tend to pay attention and attribute mean-
ings to blinks, which we recognize as deliberate, rather than to twitches, which
are likely to remain unnoticed, because they are not perceived as produced with
the intention to convey information. Whilst culture is characterized by meanings
shared within a social group, communication is a mode of social interaction
through which new meanings can come to be shared. However, communication
is generally at risk of failure, because the attribution of meaning depends on the
interlocutors’ ability to reason in the way intended by the communicator and to
select the right context for the interpretation of the communicative act. As there
is no guarantee that the addressee will interpret the communicative act in the
way intended by the communicator, there can be no guarantee that the attributed
and the intended meanings will coincide. Since a person’s cultural knowledge
crucially determines the contexts which are available to them, the risk of mis-
communication is generally higher in interactions between people from different
cultural backgrounds. Therefore, a plausible account of inter-cultural communi-
cation should provide answers to the following questions:

– What is cultural knowledge?
– How does cultural knowledge contribute to context?

I try to show that the theoretical backbone of Sperber’s (1996) epidemiological
approach to culture and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/95) Relevance-theoretic ap-
proach to communication provide explicit and well-motivated answers to these
questions. The article is structured as follows: first, some of the main tenets of
Relevance Theory are illustrated with a few examples of (inter-cultural) com-
munication. Second, the epidemiological approach to culture is introduced, and a
way of characterizing the distinction between intra- and inter-cultural communi-
cation is suggested. Finally, the framework of Relevance Theory is outlined in
order to show how the contribution of cultural background to the context can be
integrated with this approach to communication in a principled way.

2. Examples of a Relevance-theoretic account of (inter-cultural)
communication

In Relevance Theory terms, human cognition is geared towards improving the
belief system of individuals and the most important type of social interaction
through which this goal is pursued is called ostensive-inferential communi-
cation. On this view, an act of ostensive behaviour (such as a pointing gesture, a
[deliberate] wink, or an utterance) makes evident the communicator’s intention