Novel data demonstrate that sentences can be perceived as relevant without being informative to the QUD, suggesting new theoretical considerations.
In this paper, I present novel data that challenge the dominant approach to modelling linguistic relevance, according to which a sentence is relevant if and only if it is informative to the Question Under Discussion (QUD). In particular, I show that a sentence can fail to be informative to the QUD and, despite this, still be perceived as relevant. In the final section, I outline the theoretical implications of this finding.
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Diego Feinmann (2025) studied this question.
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