Relevance theory is the western linguists Sperber and Wilson Grice correlation rule based on the proposed Maxim) and generating leads (the cognitive pragmatics theory. Relevance theory of discourse understanding further pointed out that not only is a reasoning process, but a express reasoning process. The core of relevance theory is to seek optimal relevance principle that human communication will produce an optimal relevance of expectation, the recipient should determine the communicator communicative intention, and they must on the cognitive environment two communicating parties found in convoys of other words and context, the optimal relevance between by reasoning deduce the implied meaning context, thus obtaining contextual effect, achieve the aim of communication.
Relevance theory that people always expect in understanding speech by understanding speech and for what he had done hypothesis interactions. This interaction cause a contextual effect. If certain information in a context can produce contextual effect, then he is associated. And in communication process, the two communicative sides need not consider cooperation problem, people have associated intuition. Communication is the association for orientation. Communication is firm, the correlation of context is variable, people use association choose the best context and process information reach optimal relevance, in our lives many communicative behavior and the phenomenon by relevance theory can be analyzed and explained.