| Interpretation is an interlingual and intercultural communication and has been studied from the perspective of communication. Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson (2001) approaches communication from a multiple-point of view of philosophy of language, cognitive psychology, and communication. Relevance theory has been widely applied to studying utterance interpretation, translation, literature and so on. This thesis is to explore interpretation within the framework of Relevance theory, providing a relevance-theoretic account of interpretation and explanation of some important issues in interpretation.In Chapter One, the author introduces the notion of interpretation in this study and brings in Relevance theory, stating the purpose of the study and its organization.In Chapter Two, the author first analyses two basic models of communication on which Sperber and Wilson (2001) propose Relevance theory, claiming that communication is an ostensive-inferential act. Then the author outlines the core concepts of Relevance theory, and explains ostensive-inferential communication in the following way: communicator produces an ostensive stimulus from which the audience can infer the communicator's communicative intention in context. The guideline for communication is the principle of optimal relevance:"every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance"(Sperber and Wilson 2001: 158).In Chapter Three, the author analyzes that the interpretation process involving the speaker, the interpreter and the audience can be viewed as a double ostensive-inferential process. In comprehension, the interpreter acts as hearer who bears the responsibility of recovering the speaker's communicative intention by inference, accepting the first interpretation of the utterance consistent with the principle of optimal relevance as the communicative intention of the speaker; in reproduction, the interpreter has to convey the speaker's communicative intention by...
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