Verbal-Visual Model and Its Operation: A New Development of Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory (RT for short), centering on the concept of relevance and the principle of relevance, has been taking ostensive-inferential communication, cognitive context, and maximal and optimal relevance as the framework to analyze utterances in communication. It covers a very vast scope in great depth. However, it is incapable of taking different communication layers and communicators’ intentions into consideration to make a detailed and in-depth analysis of media discourses. Francisco Yus, with this challenge in mind, developed RT and set up the verbal-visual model (VV Model for short) in the early nineties of the 20th century. This paper tries to present some background knowledge of VV Model, the framework and its operation. In the concluding section, the author makes a prediction of the prospect of VV Model.