Deirdre Wilson
British linguist and cognitive scientist (born 1941)
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Biography
Wilson studied PPE at Somerville College, Oxford and subsequently completed her Bachelor of Philosophy while working with philosopher H. P. Grice. She completed her PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with linguist Noam Chomsky as her dissertation advisor. She was a lecturer at Somerville College, Oxford.
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Work
Wilson's work is in linguistic pragmatics. Pragmatics is the study of how contextual factors interact with linguistic meaning in the interpretation of utterances. Her 1975 book Presuppositions and Non-Truth-Conditional Semantics advocated a pragmatic approach to presuppositions. In her longstanding collaboration with French Anthropologist Dan Sperber she has published many books and articles over 30 years. Their 1986 book Relevance: Communication and Cognition laid the foundation for Relevance Theory which they have continued to develop in subsequent books and articles.
Relevance Theory is, roughly, the theory that the aim of an interpreter is to find an interpretation of the speaker's meaning that satisfies the presumption of optimal relevance. An input is relevant to an individual when it connects with available contextual assumptions to yield positive cognitive effects.