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A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 45

salient it will be. And, the more cognitively salient something is, the less pro-
cessing effort will be required for its mental representation and processing. It is
interesting to note that the supremacy of orangey carrots is currently being chal-
lenged by research which shows that various types of non-orangey carrots (still
grown in some parts of the world) are rich in natural substances which reduce
3
the threat of cancer. In light of general knowledge about the link between
cancer and food, as well as the growing awareness of the increasing incidence of
cancer, non-orangey carrots are likely to begin to seem more and more relevant
to more and more people, largely as a result of the dissemination of represen-
tations of their beneficial properties by means of communication.

5. Relevance in communication

Most of the time a vast range of stimuli impinge on our senses at a fairly high
rate. Some of these stimuli pre-empt our attention (e.g. loud noises, flashes of
light, etc.), thus creating an expectation that processing them will yield signifi-
cant cognitive effects. Finally, some attention pre-empting stimuli are designed
to create – and to be recognized as designed to create – the expectation that they
are worth paying attention to (e.g. a [deliberate] wink, the sound of a door bell, a
pointing gesture, an utterance, an unexpected silence or pause in speech, etc.).
This last type of stimuli are called ostensive stimuli, and as mentioned in section
2, their use in conveying information is called ostensive-inferential communi-
cation. To recognize a stimulus as ostensive entitles the addressee to presume
that whoever produced it did so because they thought this stimulus was worth
paying attention to. Consider the following exchange from Chekhov’s play
Three Sisters:

6) Vershinin: … It’s nice living here. But there’s one rather strange thing, the station is
fifteen miles from the town. And no one knows why.
Soliony: I know why it is. [Everyone looks at him] Because if the station were nearer,
it wouldn’t be so far away, and as it is so far away, it can’t be nearer [An awkward
silence].
Chekhov, Three Sisters, Act One

Soliony’s conversational contribution is likely to meet with his interlocutors’
disapproval because they have been made to expend gratuitous processing ef-
fort. By engaging in communication, Soliony creates the expectation that what
he has to say deserves the attention of the others. In other words, he issues a
promissory note to the effect that his interlocutors’ expectation of cognitive re-
ward will be fulfilled. As his remark is clearly irrelevant, he fails, not merely to
fulfil an expectation that his interlocutors happen to have formed, but to honour
a promise that he has made.