A Dynamic-adaptable Study Of The Process Of Response

Initiation and response are like Siamese twin. But in the linguisticfields, initiation is considerably studied, especially in syntactic andsemantic fields, while response is paid very little attention. Therefore, thepresent research is an exploration of the dynamic process of response bylooking into responding to the journalists' initiations at the pressconferences from the perspective of Relevance Theory and AdaptationTheory. Based on these theories, we conduct a qualitative study ofexploring the dynamic process of how the responder seeks the optimalrelevance from the initiation and how to make linguistic choices to adaptto the initiator' and other audiences' cognitive contexts and themotivation behind the linguistic choices in the process of response. Inaddition, the domain of this research is the responder's mental facultiesand the primary purpose of this study is to combine the advantages of thesufficient interpretation of Relevance Theory and the powerfuldescription of Adaptation Theory to illustrate the dynamic process ofresponse to make the study of communication and discourse analysiscomplementary and rich.Under the theoretic framework of these theories, this thesis isresponder-centered. Meanwhile, we think that response process is both arelevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process and a dynamic-adaptableprocess. For the convenience of expression, we attempt to divide thewhole process of response into two processes: Process ofInitiation-interpreting and Process of Response-producing. But it needs tobe pointed out that in the actual process of response these two processesare constantly integrated; in other words, the interpreting and producingseem to go hand in hand constantly. Through this research, the study of communication and discourseanalysis are enriched and tentatively complemented from the followingfour aspects: first, we can understand and study communication anddiscourse better through studying the response; second, on themethodology, we combine the advantage of illustration of RelevanceTheory with that of description of Adaptation Theory, obtaining fullyinsight into the data in our study; third, we try to study the social andcultural factors behind the linguistic choices of the responder beyond justlimiting to study how he makes the linguistic choices in the previousstudies; fourth, we attempt to divide the whole process of response intoProcess of Interpretation of Initiation and Process of Response-producingto explore the response better.