Functional Adaptability As A Pragmatic Strategy For Utterance Interpretation

The present research is a cognitive-pragmatic analysis of utterance interpretation, which sets its theoretical basis on Verschueren's linguistic adaptability theory within a general functional perspective on language that defines language use as a pragmatic processing of a continuous making of linguistic choices while taking into consideration the cognitive, social, and cultural functioning of language at the levels of salience for the adaptation to the contextual correlates and the structural objects.With the critical comments on the formalism approach to language that views utterance interpretation as simply equal to sentence understanding and emphasizes the syntagmatic relations of abstract semantic components as well as the earlier binary division of utterance meaning into what is said and what is implied and the like, this thesis tends to take a more eclectic approach to utterance meaning with the fusion of linguistic, psychological and cognitive perspectives. While adopting the notion of meaning merger representation proposed by K. M. Jaszczolt which identifies four sources of utterance meaning as (â…°) word meaning and sentence structure, (â…±) default interpretation mainly including cognitive default and social-cultural default, and (â…²) conscious pragmatic inference, this thesis points out its obvious lack of an algorithm that can capture the dynamic interaction of these meaning sources in utterance interpretation. Furthermore, by making reference to the implicatures stereotypical reasoning model proposed by S. H. Xu which graphically displays the mental model-based pragmatic processing of utterance interpretation while failing to identify specific meaning sources, this thesis attempts to construct such a new algorithm to disclose the dynamic interaction of utterance-meaning sources, aiming at bridging the two approaches within the framework of the adaptability theory so as to explore the pragmatic processing of utterance interpretation from the cognitive pragmatic perspective.Therefore, an adaptability-oriented pragmatic processing model of utterance interpretation is tentatively developed and proposed for the present research. Within the framework of adaptability theory, utterance interpretation is actually considered to be both a process and result of dynamically continuous making of linguistic choices, exactly meaning sources in the present research, with the varying degrees of salience for the adaptation into the contextual correlates and structural objects. It is maintained that this process goes under the guidance of intentionality together with the cognitive, social and cultural factors simultaneously, working down to undergo default interpretation for truth-conditional contents and conscious pragmatic inference for implicatures till the satisfactory utterance interpretation. Obviously it is the linguistic adaptability, to be exact linguistic choice-making that works as a major pragmatic strategy to facilitate the interpreter to effect utterance interpretation.The present research in this thesis is mainly a qualitative pragmatic analysis on the basis of the rich and widely representative data that are collected from the daily exchanges, the movies, the literary works and other relevant academic works. It is hoped that the present research is able to provide a general framework for the explication of utterance interpretation from the perspective of the interpreter, revealing the internal algorithm of complex meaning generation of the utterance under the adaptability theory of pragmatics.