Pragmatic Negation In Online Chat

Online communication is communication online using communication technologies,including email,telephone,facsimile,audio and video tcleconference, bulletin boards,discussion boards,asynchronous forums and synchronous chat (real-time).Here what we discuss is specifically made to the last form of synchronous chat,namely,online chat.Pragmatic Negation(PN)takes place frequently in online chat and is an important concept and research field in the study of Linguistics,especially in Pragmatics,which refers to those negations whose negative meaning is not expressed by explicit use of negative markers like no and not,没^mei(有^you)but is implied and needs to be reasoned out.The problem is how to work out the implied negative meaning.To solve this problem,Cooperative Principal(CP)proposed by Grice(1975), among others,is the most frequently used theory as a tool to compute out the underlying meaning of PN.In this thesis,online chat and PN are firstly explored.Then,based on the Relevance Theory(RT)and Adaptation Theory(AT)proposed by Sperber & Wilson (2001)and Verschueren(1999)respectively,a Relevance-Adaptation model(RA model)with enough consideration of context in online chat is proposed tentatively to fully interpret PN and to overcome the difficulties of CP when dealing with this task. The findings of the discussion are:1)The proposed RA model can fully interpret and describe pragmatic negations in online chat.The model takes both the message sender and the reader into consideration.An instance of PN is firstly the message sent is the result of the sender's adaptation to physical,social or mental world and secondly the message received is intended by the reader as ostensive act to be understood.Whether this PN can be understood by the message reader depends on the reader's locating the relevance and adapting to it.The relevance is achieved by the union of the new information with the reader's context.2)The model further solves the problems encountered by CP in interpreting PN, especially PN in online chat with unique contextual features and distinctive stylistic features.The new information triggers or brings relevant elements of the message reader's mental world into interpretation,which can decide the comprehension of PN in online chat. 3)Context plays an indispensable role in understanding PN in online chat. However,what really counts is not the whole context,but one or two key elements of the context.