Relevance Theory And Context Selection In Written Texts

Pragmatics, the study of the context-dependent aspects of utterance interpretation, is a relatively new discipline. The goal of pragmatics is to show how linguistic meaning interacts with contextual assumptions during utterance comprehension. With the aim to lay a foundation for a unified theory of cognitive science, D. Sperber and D. Wilson have proposed relevance theory which is a new theory in the study of pragmatics. Relevance theory is not only trying to answer philosophical matters about communication, but also explaining psychological matters during the hearer's comprehension procedure. According to the view of relevance theory, this paper makes an analysis of context selection in written texts from two aspects: one is the writer's context selection, another is the reader's context selection. On the one hand, it discusses how context constrains utterance production in written texts. On the other hand, it examines how context affects utterance interpretation in written texts. Successful communication depends on appropriate choice of context by both the writer and the reader. With the analysis, this paper concludes that relevance theory is of vital importance for further studies of utterance production and interpretation in written texts.This paper is composed of six chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction to the paper. It gives a brief description of the objective and layout of the dissertation.Chapter Two gives a survey of relevance theory. Critically inheriting and developingGrice's theory, Sperber and Wilson indicate that the traditional encoding-decoding process is attached to the cognitive-inferential process. In communication, by ostensive behaviors, the speaker makes his informative and communicative intentions manifest to the hearer and provides necessary evidences for him to infer from; according to the speaker's ostensive behaviors, the hearer infers from these evidences in order to search for the relevance. It is called optimal relevance that the utterance will have adequate contextual effects for the minimum necessary processing effort. Communication can be achieved because people consciously obey the principle of relevance when communicating?"Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance" (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 158).Chapter Three points out that different scholars hold different opinions to context. Malinowski classified context into context of culture and context of situation. Firth accepted Malinowski's notion of context of situation and elaborated on it in his linguistic theory. Halliday claimed that the field, tenor, and mode of discourse are the three features of context of situation. Then, it indicates that context in relevance theory is different from the traditional conception of context. A context in relevance theory is regarded as a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer's assumptions about the world. Inference in utterance interpretation involves the interaction of contextual assumptions with new assumptions. The selection of contextual assumptions depends on the principle of relevance.Chapter Four mainly discusses the nature, restrictive and interpretative functions of context. Communication does not exist without context, and always occurs in a certain context. On the one hand, context constrains utterance production. On the other hand, utterance interpretation can be achieved only by combining with specific contexts. Context can explain and illustrate some language phenomena such as removing ambiguity, indicating referent and deriving implicature.Chapter Five mainly investigates context selection in written texts. The written text is a form of communication between the writer and the reader. According to relevance theory, communication is a ostensive-inferential cognition process. In regard to written texts, this cognitive process is that the writer selects contexts and supplies language messages of optimal relevance to the communicator (the reader) by means of words. The goal of the writer...