Pragmatic Comprehension, Epistemic Vigilance and Scalar Implicature

Pragmatic comprehension and epistemic vigilance are treated in relevance theory as separate modules, one responsible for understanding what is communicated and the other for assigning credibility to the communicated information. Yet, they play highly interactive roles in the process of communication. Following and elaborating on Mozzarella's (2013, 2015a, 2016) approach, we propose to analyze epistemic vigilance in terms of its constraints on the hearer's expectations of optimal relevance and suggest that the degree of sophistication of the expectations lies at the core of achieving understanding and avoiding misunderstanding. We also give a tentative analysis of scalar implicatures from the perspective of epistemic vigilance.