Relevance

What do the London Science Museum, California Shakespeare Theater, and ShaNaNa have in common? They are all fighting for relevance in an often indifferent world. The Art of Relevance is your guide to mattering more to more people. You'll find inspiring examples, rags-to-relevance case studies, research-based frameworks, and practical advice on how your work can be more vital to your community. Whether you work in museums or libraries, parks or theaters, churches or afterschool programs, relevance can work for you. Break through shallow connection. Unlock meaning for yourself and others. Find true relevance and shine.

When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

Branding guru Aaker shows how to eliminate the competition and become the lead brand in your market This ground-breaking book defines the concept of brand relevance using dozens of case studies-Prius, Whole Foods, Westin, iPad and more-and explains how brand relevance drives market dynamics, which generates opportunities for your brand and threats for the competition. Aaker reveals how these companies have made other brands in their categories irrelevant. Key points: When managing a new category of product, treat it as if it were a brand; By failing to produce what customers want or losing momentum and visibility, your brand becomes irrelevant; and create barriers to competitors by supporting innovation at every level of the organization. Using dozens of case studies, shows how to create or dominate new categories or subcategories, making competitors irrelevant Shows how to manage the new category or subcategory as if it were a brand and how to create barriers to competitors Describes the threat of becoming irrelevant by failing to make what customer are buying or losing energy David Aaker, the author of four brand books, has been called the father of branding This book offers insight for creating and/or owning a new business arena. Instead of being the best, the goal is to be the only brand around-making competitors irrelevant.

Today, when companies and customers are faced with an infinite number of messages, the word "relevance" has taken on a new meaning and dimension. We know that relevance matters, but what does that mean exactly? Andy Coville guides leaders and executives toward the realization that if they can focus on a single, guiding principle--a magnetic one--that permeates their brand or company, customers will not only engage but change thinking and behavior in turn. Relevance takes us through the dimensions of relevance--both qualitative and quantitative--in order to find the starting point on the Relevance Scale: where we are and where to go from here. The book walks the reader through the elements of staying relevant as well as the circumstances that contribute to establishing a relevance platform. The author offers many examples as well as explaining messaging strategies. Whether you are working with a consumer product, a nonprofit, or a B2B company, Andy Coville believes you, your brand, or your company have the power to change and influence behavior and make an impact.

The following is neither exclusively the study of a philosopher nor a problem, and yet is both as well. Alfred Schutz is now recogniz ed to have been a profoundly insightful philosopher who explor ed the nature of social reality and the social sciences. His works are exercising a great influence in a wide range of problems and disciplines, the latter including the social sciences themselves. All of this is testimony to the sagacity and penetrating character of his analyses as well as the fruitfulness and soundness of his con cepts. Philosophy proceeds, however, by not merely accepting the work of great philosophers, but by engaging them in critical philosophic dialogue. It is time for this interchange to begin with respect to Schutz's work. To some extent, then, this work is di rected to that task. It does not undertake a systematic treat ment of the whole of Schutz's philosophy, for much more work in many aspects of his thought is yet to be done before such a pro ject can reasonably be undertaken. Yet, the issue of concern in this study is, I now believe, the philosophic center of the whole of Schutz's work.

Relevance and Narrative Research turns the vaguely defined evaluative tool “relevance” into an object of study, firmly situating questions of relevance in the context of narrative theory. It examines what relevance can do for narrative research and vice versa.

This volume is one of the first books to present a comprehensive view of lexical pragmatics, describing its origins, assumptions, scope, methodology and the various approaches to it, focusing specifically on the approach offered by relevance theory. In addition to theoretical considerations, the book discusses particular linguistic expressions and pragmatic phenomena, showing how the relevance-theoretic tools may be used to explore pragmatically motivated changes to lexically encoded meanings. The most recent developments are discussed and questions are asked to indicate directions for further research within this rapidly developing field.

This book offers a cognitive-pragmatic, and specifically relevance-theoretic, analysis of different types of humorous discourse, together with the inferential strategies that are at work in the processing of such discourses. The book also provides a cognitive pragmatics description of how addressees obtain humorous effects. Although the inferences at work in the processing of normal, non-humorous discourses are the same as those employed in the interpretation of humour, in the latter case these strategies (and also the accessibility of contextual information) are predicted and manipulated by the speaker (or writer) for the sake of generating humorous effects. The book covers aspects of research on humour such as the incongruity-resolution pattern, jokes and stand-up comedy performances. It also offers an explanation of why ironies are sometimes labelled as humorous, and proposes a model for the translation of humorous discourses, an analysis of humour in multimodal discourses such as cartoons and advertisements, and a brief exploration of possible tendencies in relevance-theoretic research on conversational humour.