An Analysis Of The Conversations In A Farewell To Arms

Utterance producing and utterance understanding are considered to be the two subjects of pragmatic research. Relevance Theory (RT), presented fully by Sperber & Wilson in their work Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986/1995), is a new approach to pragmatics, studying human communication and utterance understanding based on the cognitive perspective in dynamic context, which is applied to study conversations. And here the author chooses An Analysis of the Conversations in A Farewell to Arms—A Relevance-theoretical Communication Perspective as the thesis topic. By analyzing the selected conversations in this novel based on the relevance-theoretical communication model, the author hopes that this thesis does help to show up the inner world of the characters and then make the theme of the novel further reflected and exposed. And the thesis may be a comprehensive guideline for the practice of novel reading. Consequently, it is proved that the practicability and applicability of RT theory in the analysis of novel conversations.The concept of'communication'is both the core and premise to comprehend the relevance theory. According to Sperber and Wilson's book, communication is an ostensive-inferential process involving informative intention and communicative intention. Ostension and inference can be considered to be the two pieces of the coin—communication process, in which the communicator deals with ostension while the audience with inference. The communication based on the relevance theory claims the combination of both the code model and inferential model. Relevance theory believes that communication is a kind of cognitive act and the mutual manifestness of the cognitive environments is the basis of the successful communication. And the success of communication is relevance-oriented. The relevance in RT is relative in both condition of contextual effect and the effort in utterance understanding. The assumption is optimal relevant if it can achieve enough contextual effect with the smallest processing effort. The optimal relevance is the effect that is expected to achieve in verbal communication. And contextual assumption is another name of context in relevance theory, which plays...