The Hearer's Interpretation Of Conversational Implicature:A Relevance Theory Perspective

The study of conversational implicature initiated from American linguistic philosopher Paul Grice. His theory that laid foundation for the study of implicit utterance has aroused broad attention in the field of pragmatics. In 1980s, with the development of cognitive science, the emphases of linguistic research have gradually shifted to the psychological processing of utterance interpretation. Relevance theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson, views communication as a kind of cognitive activity and aims to reveal human communicative disciplinary starting from the nature and processing of cognition. This theory provided a powerful theoretical framework for studying the hearer's interpretation process of conversational implicature.This thesis probes into the hearer's interpretation of conversational implicature from relevance theory perspective. The study is carried through from both theoretic and practical aspects. After a review of conversational implicature theory and development of verbal comprehension theories, this thesis discusses the relevance-theoretic basis closely related to this study such as cognitive context, optimal relevance and inference. The definition of cognitive context, mutual manifestness, dynamic nature of context, the certification and function of optimal relevance as well as the nature and evidence of inference are illustrated. The procedure of conversational implicature interpretation is considered as the hearer's, combing with the literal meaning of the utterance, seeking for optimal relevant assumptions from his cognitive context and making inferences. In the practical aspect, an interpretation mechanism constructed based on relevance theory is introduced to explain the hearer's psychological processing of interpreting conversational implicature. This mechanism fairly reflects the relevance approach to implicature interpretation. It is a procedure involves both decoding and inferential processes. In this procedure, the linguistic meaning initially activates the relevant assumptions in cognitive context. The choice of context is governed by optimal relevance. Taking the combination of linguistic part and contextual part as evidence, the hearer makes inference by means of deductive devices and finally interprets the implicature. This mechanism is then applied to analyze the concrete dialogues selected from CET 4/6 listening comprehension exercises. Through the discussion and analysis, it is proved that relevance theory could provide adequately strong explanatory power in interpretation of conversational implicature.