Hello there, nice of you to join me. Yesterday the first ReadLing session was held in one of the far, almost unreachable corners of the Checkland building so I thought I’d write a blog about it (honestly, I thought that, it’s nothing to do with Tim suggesting it).

I still don’t know what I’m going to write but I’m sure it will all turn out well (this happens to be the attitude I take with my essays as well).

I guess the first thing I should mention is the fantastic turnout for the event. I didn’t count how many people were there but if anyone did and would like to enlighten those of us that don’t know, please do. Anyway, it was a lot.

I think, without being biased, the most represented group was the second year Linguistics group, so if you’ve got that bit of competitive spirit and would like your year group to beat us in the attendance competition (it’s not real) please do come along.

What was spoken about was Relevance Theory. For those of you reading this that didn’t come along and don’t know what Relevance Theory is, I’ll give a short explanation. Relevance Theory, very basically, states that when communicating, humans will find meaning that they find most relevant according to their expectations, and then stop computing. An input (which could be anything, a sight, a sound, an utterance) is considered relevant when an individual can use it to come to a conclusion that is relevant to him/her/other. These conclusions could be that it confirms a suspicion, answers a question or improves knowledge of a certain topic. These are called positive cognitive effects (it’s bold because it’s important). We like to come to these conclusions by using as little brain power as possible.

Anyway, back to the interesting stuff (you should disagree with that statement, Relevance Theory is interesting). Many interesting and imaginative  points were raised in the discussion, such as ‘What if Germans don’t know what tea is?’, and ‘If something doesn’t conform to your expectations it’s like pretending to give your dog food and then hitting it.’ You may be wondering what these points have to do with Relevance Theory, and to be honest, so am I. I will try to explain. The Germans not knowing about tea thing means… errrm, if someone doesn’t understand a certain idea (in this case tea) how will they decide whether it’s relevant to them? My answer is I don’t know, hopefully someone can explain in the comments section below. The hitting the dog thing strikes me as particularly sinister, but refers to expectations we have whilst in the midst of listening to an utterance. So, for example if I say ‘would you like to join me in the cafe at lunch time for a cup of kangaroo’. You wouldn’t expect me to ask you to join me for a cup of kangaroo, that’d be weird and you’d probably not want to be my friend. That utterance, then, seems to be, for the most part, irrelevant and nonsensical and would have no value whatsoever. If that wasn’t the point please correct me, to be honest I’m just trying to be funny.

I’m looking at my word count which currently stands at 533, and thinking that maybe that’s enough writing for now, to be honest I’m quite surprised you’ve made it this far. If anyone would like to add anything or even write a separate blog post about their experiences of ReadLing, please feel free. If you came along, good on you, I hope you enjoyed it. If not and you think I’ve made it sound marvellous, please come along next time! I’m not sure when and where it will be but there will be announcement in the near to distant future, so keep an eye out!

Thanks for reading, have a lovely day and see you for the next edition of ReadLing.