The relevance of relevance: A review of Charles Forceville’s Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Relevance theory (RT), originally proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), is a theory of human communication that is based on a general view of human cognition. In the classic version of RT, the paradigmatic example of human communication is a verbal exchange between a single speaker and a single hearer who are occupying the same space and time. In the book Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle, Charles Forceville (2020) has two main goals: first, to make classic RT accessible to a wider (and non-expert) audience; and second, to adapt RT in order to account for other forms of communication beyond the purely verbal – namely, visual and multimodal communication. In the second half of the book, Forceville demonstrates how this adapted version of RT can be applied in a series of case studies on “static visuals”. In this extended review, I attempt to do justice to Forceville’s ambitious project and to outline the key concepts and terminology involved. In the discussion, I present some criticisms and questions, while offering some suggestions as to how adapted RT can be developed even further in order to account for moving images and film.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".