Comparative Analysis Of Mental Models And The Traditional Methods To The Study Of Conversational Implicature

Conversational implicature means that speakers mean more than what they actually verbalize. It takes a significant role on the process of communication, and it has received considerable attention from philosophers, linguists and psychologists. Conversational implicature has mainly undergone the period of Cooperative Principle, Relevance Theory and cognitive foundation. Cognitive linguistic has provided a new theory frame for the study of conversational implicature, which thought the use of mental models is the basic form for human being to reason the conversational meaning.With reviewing and comparing the mental models with traditional researches on conversational implicature, we will look for a right way for people to understand conversational implicature. On the first side, The author proposes mental model theory, a new cognitive tool, to study the course of understanding conversational implicature, and she explains relevant theories, preconditions, guide rules and inferring steps of mental models, which proves that mental model theory is an accurate and complete theory. Then she reviews the traditional methods on conversational implicature, and summarizes their limitations, which are only based on maxims and logic relations to study implicature that couldn't ensure the correctness and effectiveness of the conversational implicature. Furth more, the author analyzes the conversational implicature in the discourse from traditional theories to mental model theory respectively and concludes mental models are more precise and objective to infer conversational implicature. In addition, mental model theory is applied into daily discourses such as novels, Chinese Xie Hou Yu, advertisement, etc for the purpose of proving its practicability.Mental model theory not only advances the researching system of conversational implicature, but also helps people interpret all sorts of discourses easily. People can enhance their comprehensive ability on different sorts of interlocution, reduce their misapprehension, and communicate better through a right way of mental models building. What's more, the theory provides an efficient assistance on the foreign language teaching and learning and the work of translation and interpretation.