Relevance theory as the foundation for an inclusive theory of communication

2.1 Relevance is relevance to the envisaged audience

Human beings – and probably all living creatures – constantly monitor their environment for information that is important to them. Crudely simplified, information is of two kinds: either it bodes good for an individual, because it (potentially) serves the interests of that individual, or it bodes bad for him, because it (potentially) harms his interests. This idea is captured in Sperber and Wilson’s Cognitive Principle of Relevance: people are constantly alert to anything happening around them that may benefit or endanger their chances of survival and well-being. But while nature is indifferent to the interests of humans, fellow humans, particularly those who are members of the same group, are naturally disposed, other things being equal, to help each other survive in daily life literally and metaphorically. This is probably less a matter of benign altruism than an awareness that helping others within one’s community ultimately means helping oneself, too. A crucial way to ensure survival is constantly engaging in communication with conspecifics in a relevant way. Thus, Sperber and Wilson claim, the Cognitive Principle of Relevance gives rise to the Communicative Principle of Relevance, which they define as follows: “Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance” (1995: 260). It is the Communicative Principle of Relevance that constitutes the heart of RT.

The central claim of RT can be summed up in a single sentence: every ostensive act of communication comes with the presumption of optimal relevance to its envisaged audience. From the envisaged audience’s point of view this can be phrased as: the audience at which an act of communication is directed expects this act of communication to be optimally relevant to it. Let me zoom in on each of the key terms of this pithy claim.

An ostensive act of communication is any sign or signal in any mode or combination of modes which carries a more or less specific content that its sender – the communicator – wants to convey to one or more addressees. Aiming this message, discourse, text, picture, tune, gesture, sound, bodily movement, etc. emphatically at the envisaged audience, the communicator tacitly promises to this audience: you are invited to pay attention, since what I am conveying to you is relevant to you. The form that I, the communicator, have chosen for this “ostensive stimulus” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 153) is optimal in the sense that it is the best one I can and wish, in the current situation, to provide for you.

Relevance. “Relevance” itself is a technical term in RT, although it is rooted in its informal, everyday meaning. RT stipulates that a message’s relevance has two components: its effect on the envisaged audience, and the effort it takes the envisaged audience to retrieve this effect. We can understand these as the benefit and the cost side of processing the message, respectively. When cognitive effect increases, relevance increases; when effort increases, relevance decreases. Relevance thus grows proportionally with the extent to which the message conveyed is important for the envisaged addressee. Thus, in most circumstances, “I want to marry you” has many more effects for – and is thus more relevant to – the addressee, than “there is a hole in your sock”. By contrast, given the greater amount of mental effort needed, “Looking downwards to the part of the world in which your shoes touch the ground, it has come to my attention that the textile fabric covering your feet and disappearing in one of your shoes has an opening showing part of the lower part of your left leg” is by that criterion less relevant than “there’s a hole in your sock”. It is to be noted that processing cognitive effects in, for instance, hermetic poems, abstract paintings, and philosophical treatises requires considerable mental effort – and their typical addressees are aware of this. It is thus up to them to decide, for any such ostensive stimulus, whether they want to consider themselves part of the envisaged audience. If so, they have to pay the price of investing substantial mental effort in order to be able to reap the cognitive effects.

The presumption of optimal relevance. The word “presumption” is crucial, since a presumption is by no means a guarantee. The idea is that whenever somebody begins to address you, your “gut reaction” is that whatever it is this person is going to convey to you is, in one way or another, relevant to you. But you may be disappointed in that expectation. Indeed, often what people convey to you turns out to be irrelevant. But this leaves intact the expectation that every act of communication directed at you comes with the promise that it is optimally relevant to you.

The envisaged audience. Classic RT states that relevance is always relevance to an individual (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 142–151), whereby it is important to realize that for the sake of clarity RT has adopted the convention that the communicator is always female and the addressee is always male. In the many examples in Sperber and Wilson (1995), “Mary” needs to be optimally relevant to only one person, “Peter” – and to nobody else. This means that she needs to take into account only the sum total of things she knows or believes Peter knows, believes, hopes, wants etc. that constitute his “cognitive environment” (1995: 38–45). Since one gets the impression from the many examples in classic RT that Mary and Peter know each other very well (they are probably married), Mary’s acts of communication can usually leave out or keep unspecified numerous things, because she knows that Peter already knows them, and to save him from having to spend unnecessary mental effort in processing her utterance, she will typically favour briefness wherever possible. Thus, when she sees Peter looking at her askance at the breakfast table, her ostensive stimulus “on the top shelf” is supposed to be optimally relevant for him: Peter will mentally complete that lapidary phrase into, say, “the marmalade, which Mary knows I like putting on my morning toast, is on the top shelf in the left cupboard in the corner of the kitchen”. But if the asking look to Mary would come from Alwin, Peter’s brother, who is staying with the couple for a few days, her optimally relevant ostensive stimulus might be, “if you should be looking for anything to put on your toast, you will find marmalade on the top shelf in the left cupboard in the corner of the kitchen” – which would inevitably require more mental effort on Alwin’s part.

Now while all this is relatively simple in Mary-to-Peter or Mary-to-Alwin communication, things become considerably more complicated in mass-communication. The moment a communicator addresses more than a single person, she needs to take into account the cognitive environment of at least two (but more typically, hundreds, thousands, or millions of) individuals. Since each individual has a unique cognitive environment, the communicator has to finetune her message in such a way that it will be optimally relevant to all individuals she addresses. For this reason I adapted, in Forceville (2020), “relevance to an individual” to “relevance to the envisaged audience”. Given the size of most mass-communicative audiences, each individual in it with his/her/+’s unique cognitive environment, it is possible that the individuals in the envisaged audience will not interpret the message in precisely the same manner. I will come back to this in Sections 2.4 and 2.5.

Moreover, whereas in classic RT the communicator is always Mary, in mass-communication it is frequently impossible to attribute the communicator role to a single individual. Often a message comes from an organization, say “the tax office” or “the government” or “Amnesty International”. That said, the presumption/expectation of relevance remains in operation: the communicator trusts that the envisaged audience will find the message useful, interesting, insightful etc. In order to achieve this, the communicator thinks of the best way to formulate the message, so as not to force the envisaged audience to expend unnecessary mental effort to understand it. Of course the larger and more varied the envisaged audience, the less opportunity the communicator has to ensure that the message “lands well” for each individual member of it. While Mary only has to think of how to optimize the message so that Peter understands (and hopefully accepts) its contents, in mass-communication, one size has to fit all. Moreover, while in face-to-face exchanges the roles of communicator and addressee typically alternate all the time, enabling constant fine-tuning and calibrating to ensure understanding, this is not the case in most varieties of mass-communication. Messages (which in this paper comprise anything ranging from single word utterances to entire discourses, the latter often involving information in different modes) are, as we saw in the marmalade example above, usually incomplete in the sense that the communicator counts on it that she does not need to spell out every detail, since she expects the envisaged audience to be able to retrieve pertinent details from its general or specific background knowledge. It is thanks to this that messages can often be short, and thereby spare the envisaged audience unnecessary mental effort in processing them. In specific situations, truncated messages such as “There!” “Three days ago”, and “Alwin” are perfectly adequate. Messages, moreover, can consist of neutral, factual information but often carry emotional and/or attitudinal overtones that the envisaged audience must register for communication to be successful: it matters whether a “yes” is spoken in a happy, irritated, surprised, or hesitant way. Utterances such as “What a fantastic risotto this is!” and “You are a complete asshole!” do not convey information so much as emotions and attitudes – which is why Yus has proposed to relabel the notion of “cognitive effect” as “cognitive reward” (2011: 65), which includes “affective effects” (Yus 2023: 19, italics in original). And just to be sure, while communication usually works amazingly well, it can also go slightly or dramatically wrong: “Communication is governed by a less-than-perfect heuristic. On this approach, failures in communication are to be expected: what is mysterious and requires explanation is not failure but success” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 45).

2.2 Attracting the envisaged audience’s attention and conveying information to that audience

The key issue in communication is, of course, whether the communicator has succeeded in conveying the intended message to her envisaged audience. But actually this issue by definition becomes only pertinent after another condition has been satisfied: the awareness of the envisaged audience that the communicator wants to engage in communication. That is, the communicator first of all must, in one way or another, attract the attention of the envisaged audience and make clear that her message is aimed at this envisaged audience – whether consisting of one individual (say, “Peter”) or of dozens, or millions of individuals. Two substages in the “attracting attention” part of the communicative process can be distinguished. First, the (aspiring) communicator needs to ensure that the envisaged audience becomes aware of the fact that she wants to engage in communication. This stage is taken for granted in classic RT’s Mary-to-Peter utterances, but is of course a major concern in mass-communication. An advertiser, a TV presenter, a cartoonist, the writer of a scholarly article – all of them must first of all catch the attention of the envisaged audience. If the latter is not aware of the communicator’s desire to convey something, communication breaks down before it has even properly started. Technically, the communicator needs the envisaged audience to recognize her intention to communicate. Only if the envisaged audience accepts the invitation to be addressed (technically: fulfils the communicative intention), the next stage comes into play: ensuring that the envisaged audience understands what the communicator wants to convey. If so, the communicator’s intention to inform results in comprehension of the message by the envisaged audience (technically: the informative intention has been recognized). But understanding a message is not the same as accepting it as (probably) true or appropriate. After all, we may perfectly well understand something that we consider complete nonsense. Only when the informative intention is not just recognized but also fulfilled, we can say that communication has been successful. It is worth emphasizing that communication may break down at each of these stages, and for various reasons. Here is an example to illustrate the various stages. Imagine you are travelling by train, find a left-behind newspaper on one of the seats, and start flipping through the pages. Scenario 1: you accidentally turn two pages instead of one, and thereby miss the cartoon on page 3 (hence you do not recognize the cartoonist’s intention to communicate something to you, as a prospective member of the envisaged audience). Scenario 2: you access page 3, seeing from the corner of your eye there is a cartoon, but you don’t bother to look at it (that is, you recognize, but do not fulfil the communicative intention of the cartoonist). If, by contrast, you look at it, you not only recognize but also fulfil the communicative intention (scenario 3). Now, you look at it, but unfortunately you don’t understand the cartoon (scenario 4: communicative intention recognized and fulfilled; informative intention not recognized). If you understand the cartoon you recognize the informative intention (scenario 5). However, you judge that the cartoonist unfairly ridicules your favourite politician (scenario 6: informative intention recognized but not fulfilled). Only if you both understand and accept the critical and (hopefully) witty perspective on the political state of affairs depicted, the communicative process is successful (scenario 7: both the communicative and the informative intentions have been recognized and fulfilled). To be sure, while this completes the range of theoretical possibilities, it remains an issue for discussion what would be the precise criteria for deciding whether a given informative intention is fulfilled (for more discussion and examples of the recognition and fulfilment of the communicative and informative intentions, see Forceville 2020: 35–40).

2.3 The first interpretation of a message by the addressee is typically the right one

One of RT’s most daring and insightful claims is that communication can be so fast and, usually, successful because the envisaged audience of a message stops interpreting it as soon as it has arrived at a satisfactory interpretation. So, the envisaged audience typically takes the first interpretation that comes to mind as the one that the communicator presumably intended. The rationale behind this is that if the envisaged addressee would have to consider a second, or third interpretation, that would decrease relevance because it requires extra mental effort. Of course, just as the presumption of optimal relevance may in reality disappointingly fail to be satisfied, the first interpretation of any message may actually not be the one that the communicator expected the addressee to derive. In such a case, communication went awry – and we would have to say retrospectively that the communicator did not choose an adequate way to formulate the message. But in everyday exchanges, the mechanism of the “first interpretation is the intended one” works well in by far most cases. That said, as we saw above, the creators of messages in certain genres (such as hermetic poems), expect their envisaged audience to be prepared to think beyond their first interpretation, spending extra mental effort to gain extra cognitive rewards.

2.4 Relevance comes with degrees of commitment to the communicated content

RT distinguishes between explicit and implicit meaning (“implicatures” and “explicatures” in Sperber and Wilson 1995: 182). For explicatures holds that the addressee fully understands the message, since all the pertinent information is “objectively” part of the message. “You will find the wine bottles in the cellar” is explicit – provided, of course, that the addressee knows English, and is familiar with the concepts “wine bottle” and “cellar” (and “finding” and “in” …). Even explicit messages, that is, can yield explicatures only on the basis of background knowledge that is shared between the communicator and the addressee.

But often, as we have seen in 2.1, information in a message is not in itself complete enough to enable the recipient to derive the “cognitive reward” that makes it relevant to him. Typically, that is, for the message to achieve relevance the addressee needs to combine it with additional information that is available to him – and that the communicator expects to be available to him. Such additional information is often part of the background knowledge that the communicator trusts the addressee to be able to recruit from his cognitive environment. Combining information in the specific spatio-temporal situation with presumably available background knowledge leads the envisaged addressee to derive one or more implicatures, which are to be inferred. For instance, someone may say to a talking person in a Dutch train, “Sorry, but this is the Silence compartment”, assuming that the addressee knows that one is supposed to be silent in the train’s Silence compartment – and thus infer the implicature, “I should not talk here”. But the pertinent information that needs to be inferred can also be part of specific background knowledge shared between the communication partners. When my wife and I arrive home from work, late and tired, she may look at me, and say, “I still owe you a dinner”. In the given situation, I may infer from this the implicature that she suggests we go out for dinner in a restaurant rather than buy and cook food ourselves, since this is the first interpretation of “I still owe you a dinner” that makes the message relevant to me.

Now whereas in this example I will probably have little difficulty deriving the implicature that my wife intended me to, in other situations it may be less clear for me to decide on what, precisely, she wanted to convey. Imagine it is a Saturday morning in July, and my wife looks at me, saying, “The sun is shining”. How am I to make this piece of explicit information relevant by inferring the implicature that she intends me to? A good guess would be that she suggests we go out to benefit from the good weather. But does she suggest we go walk in the park? Cycle to the beach for a swim? Put out on our terrace, at long last, the garden table and chairs? Go to the chemist’s and buy sun-block? Or is this a hint that I go up to the attic and pull down the shutters to ensure the house will not become too hot? Her rather general utterance leaves room for a lot of interpretation on my part. Not each of these interpretations, to be sure, is equally plausible. If we had, in the preceding days, repeatedly said to each other that if it would be sunny on Saturday we would go and walk in the park/cycle to the beach/put out the garden set/buy sun-block/close the shutters in the attic, then this conversation on this particular topic would clearly be part of our jointly accessed, “mutually manifest” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 42) background information – and therefore be a highly probable candidate to constitute the intended implicature. In such a situation, the implicature would be a “strong” one. But if we had not discussed any of these possible activities for a sunny Saturday before, it would be unclear which of these implicatures (or any of a host of others) my wife intended me to derive. Any of them would, thereby, be rather weakly implicated: what she wanted to convey is quite vague. If in the preceding days we repeatedly discussed the possibility of cycling to the beach, but none of the other actions or activities, my wife saying “it is sunny” strongly implicated that we should cycle to the beach. An appropriate response to that would be, for instance, “OK, I will unlock the bikes”. But if in that situation I were to respond, somewhat angrily, “You always expect me to run up all the stairs to close the shutters in the attic!” my wife would presumably be highly surprised, and rightly so, and she might retort, “That’s not at all what I meant!” RT would say that the “please close the shutters in the attic” implicature would be a very weak one in the situation at stake – if it should count as an implicature at all – and that I misinterpreted her.

These examples show that there is a continuum from highly explicit to highly implicit meaning, which teaches us a very important lesson: the more a message verges toward the explicit pole of the continuum, the more the responsibility for its derivation resides with the communicator. By contrast, the more it verges toward the implicit pole, the more that responsibility shifts to the envisaged audience. Of course, in everyday life, the question whether a given message contains strongly, weakly, or very weakly implicated meanings is often a bone of contention, and in view of who is responsible for their derivation the judgment which type of meaning is at stake can have serious consequences.

2.5 Intentional versus unintentional meaning

As we have seen in Section 2.4, meaning can range from more or less fully explicit to very weakly implicit. In the case of a weak implicature the addressee infers a meaning for which he holds the communicator, rightly or wrongly, at least somewhat responsible. But, we can ask, is there any kind of meaning that can be said to be not even very weakly implicated? That is, can there be completely unintended meaning? Surely the answer has to be affirmative. Something can be meaningful, even extremely meaningful, whereas it is crystal clear that the communicator did not want to share this meaning with the audience that interpreted it. Let us say you received a mail from a trusted colleague, telling about some measures the boss is going to take that will negatively affect the team you are a member of. You are not all amused and vent your discontent, vilifying the boss, in your response to the trusted colleague. Unfortunately, you failed to notice that your colleague sent her mail to the entire team, and instead of replying to her only, you accidentally ticked the “reply all” option, the “all” including the boss herself … The envisaged audience of your message consisted only of the trusted colleague who sent the original mail – and no one else. To all others, your message may be very insightful, and thus relevant, but you did not intend to be relevant to them (particularly not the boss!). Another example of such unintended meaning would be a lawfully wedded woman, whispering to her husband, in the throes of love-making, not his name, but that of her secret lover.

In both these cases, any meaning inferred by the audience may be highly relevant, but it was not intended for them. In Forceville (2020) I propose the adjective “symptomatic” (borrowed from Bordwell 1989: 9) for meaning that is unintentionally conveyed. Possibly running counter to classic RT, I moreover propose that “unintentional/symptomatic communication” is a contradiction in terms, and that it therefore falls outside the provenance of what should count as communication per se. But of course, it is ultimately a moot point whether this is accepted or not, as long as “symptomatic meaning” is understood to be fundamentally different from meaning in the explicit-implicit spectrum. Two issues are crucial here. First, it is in practice often difficult or impossible to decide whether a given chunk of meaning should be considered weakly implicated or symptomatic. Indeed, communicators can try to fob off responsibility by dishonestly claiming that the addressee derived meaning that was wholly unintended by her. (Perhaps your “reply all” action was not so accidental, after all …?) Second, the study of inadvertent, unintended meaning is a highly pertinent scholarly pursuit. Researchers critically evaluating ideological issues are often keen to expose symptomatic meaning: they are interested in meanings that the communicator inadvertently “exuded” (Yus 2022: 23) or “leaked” (Yus 2022: 29).

4.1 A pictogram

The five key RT questions can for Figure 1 be answered as follows:

1. The various forms of this visual belong to the genre of signs that aid navigation in public buildings. The location of this (as of any) pictogram is crucial for its interpretation.

2. The communicating agent is the authority in charge of the public building at stake, which needs to ensure optimal clarity to and safety of the people moving within it.

3. All people moving in a building looking for the “exit” belong to the envisaged audience. In practice, these will mainly be people who are not (very) familiar with the building’s ground plan.

4. The communicator expects the envisaged audience to previously have learned the meaning of this coded sign.

5. The sign presents fully explicit meaning.

Figure 1:

Four pictograms signalling “here is the exit” (Google Images).

4.2 A shop name

The five key RT questions can for Figure 2 be answered as follows:

1. The idiosyncratically stylized “Syriously” appears above a shop window, which is typically the place where names of shops appear. So, this word belongs to the genre: “shop name”.

2. The owners of the shop are the communicators: it is them that have an interest in, and the right to, placing the name of their shop above its front window.

3. The name of a shop functions to attract attention to the wares sold in that shop, so the envisaged audience consists of (prospective) customers of Syriously.

4. Regular customers would of course know what kinds of goods would be sold in the shop. Others would be expected to have enough knowledge of English to understand that the shop name is a pun merging “Syria” and “seriously”. The audience would ideally also recognize that the style adopted for the shop name aims to resemble Arabic letters.

5. The punning name of the shop can be decoded and is therefore explicit. The “Syrian/Arabic” connotations are strongly implicit – but only viewers recognizing the Arabic style will find it relevant. They will infer that the wares sold in the shop are somehow “Syrian” – and that the owners adopt a somehow “serious” attitude to their products. Note that one would either have to be already familiar with the shop or walk to the shop (or find it online) to realize that it sells Syrian take-away food.

Figure 2:

Name of shop, above shop window, at Botermarkt, Haarlem, The Netherlands (28 December 2023, photographed by the author).

4.3 A political cartoon

The five key RT questions can for Figure 3 be answered as follows:

1. This four-part (narrative) series of pictures belongs to the genre of the political cartoon. The genre is governed by the audience’s expectation that it offers a critical comment on a political state of affairs, and does so in a purportedly humorous or witty manner.

2. The (Slovakian) Marian Kamensky is the cartoon’s creator. We know this because his signature appears in the bottom right corner. Of course, to assess this we would have to be familiar with Kamensky’s signature.

3. Typically, regular readers of media in which Kamensky’s cartoons appear constitute the envisaged audience. They would thus be familiar with this particular cartoonist’s style. However, in this case the cartoon was never published, as newspapers found it too controversial (e-mail from Marian Kamensky to the author, 19 April 2025), but it circulated on internet, downloaded from the cartoonist’s website. To be sure, any recontextualization (in a blog, or newsletter, or via X …) alters the identity of the cartoon’s audience.

4. Kamensky expects the envisaged audience to recognize the (then) chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, and to be aware that Merkel said “Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage that”) during a speech on 31 August 2015 about refugees wanting to come to Germany. That is, the envisaged audience is supposed to construe the metaphor “admitting (too) many refugees into Germany is feeding (too) many pigeons”.

5. The message is not explicit, as no code exists that specifies that “pigeon” is synonymous with “refugee”. It is strongly implicit, as the metaphor must be construed to make the cartoon relevant. Minimally, the envisaged audience needs to infer the strong implicature that, supposedly, Merkel has underestimated the difficulty of accommodating large numbers of refugees in Germany. More weakly implicated are inferences such as “Merkel was unwise/foolish/over-optimistic …”, “Merkel wants Germany to accommodate too many refugees”, “If a country tries to accommodate too many refugees, they end up chasing the native inhabitants out of their own country”. Inasmuch as these are weak implicatures, these inferences cannot be attributed to Kamensky; the responsibility for these inferences shifts to the addressee who derives them. Significantly, the ideological signature (left-wing, right-wing, sympathetic to immigration, opposed to immigration) of any re-publishing medium is bound to encourage some implicatures rather than others.

Figure 3:

Unpublished cartoon Mutti (by © Marian Kamensky) reproduced with permission of Marian Kamensky. Thanks to Martin Poduska and Maciej Grzenkowicz for alerting me to the cartoon.

4.4 A comic strip

The five key RT questions can for Figure 4 be answered as follows:

1. Figure 4 is an instalment of the genre “daily newspaper strip”, specifically “The Wizard of ID”, first published in 1964. By 2002 it appeared in more than 1,000 newspapers across the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Id, accessed 5 May 2025). Such strips are supposed to be light-heartedly humorous – so ideally the aimed-for “cognitive reward” is a smile.

2. The communicators are the creators of the series, Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, which we know thanks to their names above the strip. Habitual reader-viewers would also recognize the distinctive style of the strip, and thus immediately know who are the communicators.

3. The envisaged audience would typically consist of subscribers of the newspaper in which the strip appears – and more specifically of fans of the strip. It is such viewer-readers who, in the pre-digital era of 1977, would come across the strip.

4. Regular readers of the strip would recognize the two characters, the King and Sir Rodney the Chicken-Hearted, and, having seen many previous instalments, would know that the King is a tyrannical man, and Sir Rodney cowardly, not overly intelligent, and eager to please his monarch. For this particular instalment, the envisaged audience would be expected to know about the convention to stick up posters with pictures of “wanted” criminals in public space. Moreover, the envisaged audience is supposed to be familiar with the actress Farrah Fawcett, who at the time was considered one of the sexiest women on earth.

5. The language part can be decoded, and yields explicatures such as “the King wants Sir Rodney to stick up Wanted posters with Sara Fawcett’s photograph so that she can be arrested”. The strip achieves relevance only if the audience recruits the awareness that the verb “want” is used in two of its meanings: “sought-to-be-arrested” and “sexually desired” – the latter meaning explaining why the King has not yet considered the charges that should normally, of course, be clear before anybody can be legally “wanted”. The double meaning is a strong implicature: without inferring both meanings, the strip is not funny, hence does not yield cognitive rewards, and is thus not relevant to a given addressee.

Figure 4:

Instalment of The Wizard of ID (by Bryant Parker and Johnny Hart, first published 20 July 1977). Reprinted by permission of © John Hart Studios Inc.

4.5 A print advertisement

The five key RT questions can for Figure 5 be answered as follows:

1. The picture-plus-text is a commercial advertisement. Reader-viewers thus know that the communicator wants to promote something, in this case a conference, and realize that participating in conferences usually costs money.

2. The name of the conference ECOM21 and the logos of sponsors, Decta, KPMG, and Mastercard make clear who is/are the communicator(s).

3. The envisaged audience consists of potential attendees of this “Baltics’ Top Fintech Gathering”. The organizers think that advertising a business conference in the capital of Latvia in an inflight magazine of Baltic airlines will reach many people of the target audience.

4. Background knowledge and contextual circumstances the communicator expects the envisaged audience to be able to recruit include that business people may be interested in finance-related conferences, that they typically fly, that they may have time during the flight to leisurely consider the ad, and that these are people who can afford the fee (which turns out to start at €199,-).

5. The verbal information in the ad is largely coded, and yields explicit information concerning details of the conference, its venue, participants, countries represented, partners and speakers, a QR code, and a discount code. The logos of sponsors also constitute explicatures. The photograph shows musicians performing on a stage during ECOM21 in 2023, and may yield implicatures such as: “ECOM21 mixes business with pleasure” and “ECOM21 finds artistic performances important”. These are relatively weak implicatures, and their derivation, unlike that of the written information and the logos, is thus largely the responsibility of the audience. The typo of “countries” in “30+ countires” [sic] is clearly unintended, and thereby constitutes symptomatic meaning. If found relevant it is so thanks to the Cognitive, not the Communicative Principle of Relevance (leading, possibly, to the inference, “If the organizers are so careless as to miss a typo in the ad they commissioned, their conference may be similarly sloppy – so I won’t go there”).

Figure 5:

Advertisement ECOM21 Conference, 27–28 November 2024, Riga, Latvia (October 2024, Baltic Outlook, Inflight Magazine).

4.6 A Zoom meeting

The five key RT questions can for Figure 6 be answered as follows:

1. Figure 6 is a screenshot that is part of the genre “recorded Zoom-meeting video”.

2. In Zoom meetings, which became hugely popular during COVID, participants typically take turns being communicators and addressees.

3. See (2).

4. Shared background knowledge importantly pertains to awareness how this medium works, such as that participants sit in front of their screens, mute themselves when not talking, and switch off their cameras when they leave the meeting.

5. As Yus (2011) proposes, cognitive effects may also be non-propositional, and for instance include (non-verbally conveyed) emotions, evaluations, and attitudes. Dressing and behaving professionally is thus arguably part of the “ostensive stimulus” of communication in a Zoom meeting. Clearly the man in the top left screen forgot to switch off his camera immediately after the meeting ended, and now reveals he was wearing shorts, and indulges in uninhibited bodily behaviour. Obviously, he did by no means intend to communicate any of this – and thereby this is an instance of symptomatic meaning.

Figure 6:

Screenshot of just-finished Zoom meeting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWGe7uOuPU, accessed 5 May 2025).

Of course, much more can be said about each of the case studies. SFL and semiotics-oriented scholars might want to engage critically with issues such as that the stylized human person in Figure 1 is a man and not a woman. Perhaps they would want to explore the ideological implications of the metaphor “refugees are pigeons” in Figure 3 in more detail (is this bird’s inclination to shit all over the place one of the features supposedly to be metaphorically mapped onto “refugees” …?). Or maybe they would like to discuss the sexism of the King in Figure 4. All these are legitimate, pertinent questions. But they all arise after assessing the communicative situation in the cool, “objective” manner that RT does, and I hope to have convinced the envisaged audience of this paper that, and how, RT offers the template that scholars interested in addressing ideological and ethical dimensions of multimodal discourse can (and should) build on.