The Interpretation Of Implicature Within The Framework Of Relevance Theory

Implicature is a common phenomenon in daily life, which plays an important role in a successful communication. This thesis aims to systematically discuss the definition, classification and interpretation mechanism of implicature within the framework of Relevance Theory. The detailed contents are listed as follows:Firstly the author summarizes the studies and limitations of traditional pragmatic theories of implicature and the present study of implicature in relevance-theoretical framework. In 1957 Grice distinguished between what he called natural meaning and non-natural meaning. Natural meaning is the kind of meaning literally conveyed through conventional words, while non-natural meaning is the meaning over and above what is literally meant with conventional words, of which Grice showed concern with the latter and formed the theory of conversational implicature in 1967. He suggested that rational communicators are assumed to obey the Cooperative Principle and its maxims to achieve a successful communication. If the communicators disobey or flout CP and its maxims, conversational implicature will be generated. Grice classified implicature into conventional implicature and conversational implicature, and he further divided the latter into particularized and generalized one.There have been extensive amendments proposed to the original Gricean theory of implicature. Grice's theory was claimed to be too weak in that it allowed for deriving all the possible implicatures rather than only the ones intended by the speaker. Neo-Gricean pragmatists follow Grice's way of analysis. Horn and Levinson are representatives of this group who use two or three principles to regulate a conversation. Their approaches both emphasize the importance of sub-principles in different ways. And their works are only minor complements to Gricean study of implicatures, for they still haven't worked out the working mechanisms in communication.After a brief overview of the previous studies of implicatures, Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson in 1986 is introduced. They claim that human communication is an ostensive-inferential communication, and in this process, the communicator produces the most relevant information, which is called ostension. From the hearer's perspective, they would choose the most relevant assumption and use the deductive device to make logical inference so that they can recognize the communicator's intention. According to Relevance Theory, explicatures, implicatures should be inferred, and the process is searching for relevance between an utterance and a context. The cognitive, exceptionless principle is providing a"cut-off point", so to speak, for deriving implicatures: once the optimal relevance is achieved, the computation of implicature stops.Based on Gricean study, from chapter four on, the author uses the relevance-theoretic approach to systematically analyze implicature. Grice's distinction between what is said by an utterance and what is implicated is probably the best known instantiation of the explicit/ implicit distinction. What is said is equated with the truth-conditional content of the utterance which in turn is equated with sentence meaning, leaving implicatures as the sole domain of pragmatics. But these terms do not feature in Relevance Theory. Some of what are taken to be conversational implicatures on Gricean accounts, specifically certain cases of"generalized"conversational implicatures, turn out to be pragmatic aspects of explicature. And the notion of Gricean"conventional implicature"does not arise within Relevance Theory. After comparing Gricean implicatures with relevance-theoretic ones, the author redefines and reclassifies the implicature within Relevance Theory. In Relevance Theory, implicatures fall into one or the other types of implicated premises and implicated conclusion and differentiate in strength like weak and strong implicatures. The stronger the implicature is, the closer it is to what is implicated, and the more likely it is implicated conclusion. Their relationship can be showed as follows: In chapter five,the relevance－theoretic interpretation of implicature and the merits of a relevance-theoretic approach to interpreting implicature are covered．The most important aspect of relevance-theoretic comprehension of implicature relies on the presumption of optimal relevance．There are two consequences of the presumption of optimal relevance:one is that the first satisfactory interpretation is the only satisfactory interpretation；and the other is that extra effort demanded implies extra efrect．And lastly,the author focuses on the interpretation of impl icature derived from a metaphor from relevance-theoretic point of view．Robyn Carston(2002)once proposes that the account of metaphors in terms of loose use and relevance-driven processing has been,and continues to be something of a breakthrough in the understanding of a metaphor,but it is still incomplete．She suggests that the processing need to be supplemented by a further cognitive component in order to be fully explanatory．Firstly,the author raises the emergence problem in interpreting implicature derived from a metaphor which cannot be solved within traditional metaphor models and also points out that interpretation of emergence properties plays a crucial role in metaphor understanding．The relevance-theoretic inferential procedure which includes disambiguation,saturation,free enrichment,reference assignment,complement of implicated premise and conclusion and so on can properly solve the problem,so as to better interpret impl icature derived from a metaphor．And then the author brings the cross-space mapping and emergent structure into the pragmatic inference within Relevance Theory,and proposes a new on-line working procedure for interpreting implicature derived from a metaphor．The author also proposes that the successfid interpretation of a metaphor does not only rely on pragmatic inference but also on cognitive component - space mapping. This new procedure can work out the working mechanism of a metaphor from a cognitive linguistic point of view and make a satisfactory inference from a pragmatic point of view. The former is the weak point of relevance theory, and the latter is the weak point of conceptual integration theory.