Analysis Of Verbal Communication Based On Contextual Adaptation

Verbal communication is in direct and close relation to people's life. People have various linguistic activities such as interpersonal communication, thought communication, and so on, by using language that is the tool owned only by human beings. Therefore, linguists focus and keep researching on the problem how people can express their communicative thoughts properly and attain their communicative purposes successfully in verbal communication.Verbal communication is not an independent process, but related closely to the context in it. Only understand context properly, can people understand the utterances correctly, make proper language choices in the verbal communication, and then make communication successful.Jef Verschueren points out in his Adaptation Theory that the successful communication depends on the successful adaptation. Adaptation Theory advances the study on language use from a functional perspective, i.e., verbal communication is a process of adapting speech to context and communicative purpose. Based on its key notions of the three properties of language, the thesis analyzes the contextual correlates adaptation and its significant role in communication; expounding why adaptation is quite necessary for dynamic context in verbal communication.The thesis presents the new clues based on Adaptation Theory for researching verbal communication from the perspective of context. Then it analyzes exclusively the contextual adaptation in specific examples of verbal communication in people's daily life by discussing the contextual correlates in adaptation. Applying contextual adaptation to the analysis of verbal communication, the thesis illustrates the significance of adaptation to context; and explores the important value of contextual adaptation in the study of context as well as verbal communication, and the practical merit of searching for proper strategies for verbal communication in further study.