# relevance and prosody **Abstract:** Prosody provides both ‘natural’ and properly linguistic input to utterance comprehension. It contributes not only to overt communication but to covert or accidental forms of information transmission. Its function is typically to convey emotions or attitudes or to alter the salience of available interpretations. How should these aspects of communication be described and explained? This paper takes a relevance-theoretic approach, focusing on four main issues: (a) how should the communication of emotions or attitudes be analysed? (b) how do ‘natural’ prosodic elements contribute to communication? (c) what does prosody encode? (d) what light can prosody shed on the place of pragmatics in the architecture of the mind?