A Relevance-Adaptation Study Of The Production And Interpretation Of Non-Information Seeking Questions

As one of the four basic sentence types defined by Quirk et al. (1985), questions occur very frequently in our verbal communication and the proper use and comprehension of questions play significant roles in achieving the purpose of verbal communication successfully. Therefore, questions themselves as well as their functions have always been the focus of language research. It is acknowledged that the basic function of questions is seeking information, while in recent years, the non-information seeking functions questions perform and how these functions are realized have been attracting more and more attention from linguists.Up to now, however, there is still no adequate systematical research concerning the production and interpretation of this kind of questions. In many cases, communicators are not able to recognize the real meaning of this particular sentence type, which proves to be a great obstacle to the smooth proceeding of verbal communication. The present study is to explore the production and interpretation process of non-information seeking questions through analyzing the classifications and identification of their functions and the nature of relevance seeking and adaptation in this process.Based on the previous studies on models of communication, the present study combines the strengths of Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory as the theoretical basis. By analyzing the collected data, this thesis makes a qualitative analysis of the production and interpretation of noninformation seeking questions in English. It is proposed in this thesis that as indirect speech acts, non-information seeking questions mainly perform six types of functions. The reason why speakers will choose these particular sentence types of non-information seeking questions to perform certain functions and the way hearers can properly interpret the real meaning of such questions lie in the fact that language use is a process of both relevance seeking and adaptation to the complicated contextual correlates, including the physical world, the social world and the mental world of communication and communicators. The production and interpretation of non-information seeking questions are both dynamic processes of the inter-adaptation of linguistic forms and the contextual correlates.This study sheds lights on the mechanism of the production and interpretation of non-information seeking questions as well as the nature of language use. Thus, it could help develop the meta-pragmatic awareness of language users and make them take the relevant contextual correlates into account in the production and interpretation of this kind of questions. In this way, language users could improve their ability of language use, realize their communicative purpose successfully and establish and maintain good interpersonal relations.