Abstract: This paper has summarized the theoretical development of the relevance theory in the first decade of 21st century. Meanwhile, it has also explored in detailed how the relevance theory is applied in the following fields: discourse analysis, media discourse, literature, translation, and verbal humor. Analysis shows that the relevance theory has been widely applied in the above fields as well as some new ones such as lexical pragmatics, on-line discourse analysis, and translation of Chinese classical literature works.