Relevance in computer-mediated conversation

1. Introduction Relevance or relatedness across speaker utterances is a basic normative ideal of conversation, upon which inter-subjective coherence is said to depend (Grice 1975; Sperber and Wilson 1986). Floutings of relevance are the exceptions that prove the rule, in that they typically signal an underlying coherence that can be derived through cognitive inferencing. Most research on relevance assumes a model of conversation based on spoken communication, in which logically-related utterances tend to occur adjacent to one another in temporal sequence. In text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC), in contrast, related utterances are not reliably adjacent, as in the following Internet Relay Chat exchange (example from Paolillo, 2011):