On Redundancy: From The Perspectives Of Human Communication And Pragmatics

The redundancy idea comes form Mathematician Claude E. Shannon (1949). According to information theory, all forms of communication are not free from noise. In technical terms, redundancy is an effective means by which signal to noise ratios can be reduced without a technical examination. As a result, the chances of successful transmission can be greatly enhanced. However, human communication is not a simple encoding and decoding process. There is a gap between the semantic representation of sentences and the thoughts actually communicated by utterances. In fact, human communication possesses a unique inferential model, which distinguishes it from other forms of communications. So there is in need of a workable human communication model.It's well known that "to be economical" is human's instinct. In contrast, the term "redundancy" often invokes negative association, such as uselessness, wordiness, verbiage, prolixity. Some even regard redundancy as a roadblock to effective communication. Students are criticized for using more words when one word can do. So it seems quite necessary to draw a line of demarcation between positive redundancy and negative redundancy. If the redundancy is morphologically, grammatically, semantically correct or being deliberately used to achieve a pragmatic effect in the immediate context (cultural background), it is positive; otherwise it is negative. Positive redundancy depends on culture. The same redundancy regarded as positive in one culture may become negative in another. Positive redundancy deserves a justification. The term of "redundancy" also calls for a neutral definition.The English name of pragmatics was invented by Charles Morris in 1937. Though pragmatics was once described by Barhillel as the "wastebasket" of linguists and philosophers of language, the past decades have witnessed a booming period of this discipline. Attempts to interpret human communication from different aspects have mushroomed. Redundancy is not only a grammatical or semantical phenomenon but also a phenomenon of pragmatics. Qian (2002: 190) argues, "Acceptance of redundancy...is a matter of pragmatics". Unfortunately he has not gone any further. Redundancy has been neglected by semantics for a long time, then how do pragmatics explain this phenomenon? Thus we fall back on quite a few influential theories of pragmatics. They are Cooperative Principle, the Relevance Theory, the Politeness Principle, Face-saving Theory, etc. In order to interpret pragmatic redundancy more workably, we need to fine-tune the established models. We also think that knowing how to use positive redundancy tallies with Dell Hymes' opinion of communicative competence.Culture and language are interrelated. Any kind of language research cannot ignore cultural factors. The study of redundancy is no exception. Negative pragmatic transfer of redundancy is studied in the field of interlanguage pragmatics. Two kinds of negative pragmatic transfer are then recognized: pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic. The author argues that apart from poor linguistic proficiency and insufficient exposure to authentic English environment, there are three basic reasons. Chinese and English are different semiotic systems. Compared with Chinese, English is associated with evident grammatical redundancy. The synthetic thinking mode together with the fuzzy logic has left a trace in the Chinese language, while hypotaxis is the natural outcome of formal logic pattern of western people's mode of thinking. What's more, different conventions also contribute to different acceptance. It's hoped that the study of redundancy will help to bring about deeper language research and better foreign language teaching. At present, foreign language materials for class use cry for authenticity.To sum up, this paper attempts to investigate redundancy in terms ofhuman communication and pragmatics, and at the same time study how this work could benefit language research and English language teaching in China, and contribute to cross-cultural understanding. The study of redundancy, we believe, is bound to attract a great amount of intellectual attention...