1 In Anne Barron, Yueguo Gu and Gerard Steen (eds.). 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics, pp. 310-322. London / New York: Routledge. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315668925-24 Relevance * Stavros Assimakopoulos University of Malta (stavros.assimakopoulos@um.edu.mt) 1. Introduction The domain of inferential pragmatics owes a lot of its existence to the pioneering work of Herbert Paul Grice (1957, 1975), which emphasised that successful verbal communication requires not only the knowledge of some linguistic code, but also a general ability to draw inferences. As he famously showed, it is because of this ability that we manage to spontaneously communicate more than we actually say in everyday conversation. For example, consider the following exchange: (1) John: Excuse me, do you have a lighter? Mary: I don’t smoke. Here, Mary is, strictly speaking, saying only that she is not a smoker, but John can quite straightforwardly take her utterance to mean that she does not have a lighter. Indeed, in this particular context it would be quite hard – if not impossible – for John to think that Mary intended to communicate anything different to him. In the Gricean picture, such inferences, dubbed particularised conversational implicatures, arise due to the manipulation of a set of norms that we typically abide by as rational human beings in our effort to be cooperative with our interlocutors. These maxims, as Grice called them, include various categories, namely, quality (truthfulness), quantity (informativeness), relation (relevance) and manner (clarity) (for an overview, see Davis 2014). In our particular example in (1), it seems to be the maxim of relation that ensures the success of Mary’s communicative act. In this respect, it is by assuming that Mary is a cooperative interlocutor who therefore observes all the maxims, that John can go on to * I would like to thank the editors of The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics for their kind invitation, guidance and valuable advice regarding the contents of this chapter. I am also grateful to Billy Clark, Albert Gatt, Alexandra Vella and Rebecca Vella Muskat for their extensive and insightful comments on earlier versions of it. Needless to say, all errors remain mine.