An Analysis Of Written Discourse Under The Cognitive Context

As one of the important concepts in pragmatics, context has been studied in many fields for a long time. Many scholars contribute a great deal to the development. of the context. Traditional view of context focuses on the influence of external factors. Context is regarded as a static entry which exists in human being's mind before the process of communication. With the development of cognitive science, people start to research it from the perspective of psychology. In 1986, Sperber & Wilson put forward the notion of cognitive context under the framework of relevance theory in their book: Relevance: Communication and Cognition, which opens a new way for its research..This thesis uses the theory of cognitive context to analyze the production and comprehension of written discourse. As a dynamic activity, communication is context-dependent. Written discourse is the intermedium used to transmit information between the writer and reader. So it should be analyzed with dynamic theory. The cognitive researches view context as a dynamic psychological construct, which is formed by sets of contextual assumptions stored in people's brain. During communication, participants combine the information with cognitive context and choose the appropriate contextual assumptions to achieve the successful communication. In written communication, the written discourse production is greatly influenced by the writer's mental schema, written intention, his estimation of the reader's cognitive context and so on; the written discourse comprehension is the process of reformulation of the reader's cognitive context. However, the content of cognitive context is complex, how to select and construct the appropriate ones? In order to solve this problem, Sperber & Wilson propose the notion of ostensive-inferential communication and relevant principle. According to their view, communication is regarded as a process of ostensive-inference: addressor starts the ostensive stimulus; addressee combines it with contextual assumptions to infer writer's communicative intention. As a special form of communication, written communication can also be regarded as this form. Relevant principle is the main idea of relevance theory. It governs the reformulation of cognitive context. In order to make communication succeed, the core factor is the pursuit of optimal relevance by both the participants. Therefore, relevant approach to cognitive context shed a new light on written discourse analysis.This thesis is meticulously organized. First the research history of context is reviewed and the term of written discourse is also introduced. Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework is introduced in detail. As the main part of this thesis, cognitive context's functions in written discourse production and comprehension are analyzed separately. It is valuable for this thesis to do the analysis of written discourse under the superior dynamic cognitive study of context. This helps people have a further understanding about their mental activity during the process of written communication. However, there are also some limitations longing to be solved by the author's further research.