The Cognitive Relevance in Understanding Coronavirus Posters

Abstract

Relevance theory is a psychological model for understanding the cognitive interpretation of language. It was developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986. Its main aim is that every utterance creates in the addressee an expectation of relevance. The underlying assumption of relevance theory is that in any given context, the addressee has to assume that what people say is relevant. In this paper, the relevance theory is approached in its application to the posters on Coronavirus. The analysis will be conducted to find out how these posters achieve successful communication and how is that the audience recognizes that the designer of each poster has something to say that matters, something that is relevant and how the addressee understands the content of these posters and how he/she uses their cognition to interpret the posters’ contents and finds them relevant.