A Pragmatic-cognitive Approach To The Generation And Interpretation Mechanism Of Flattery

Flattery is a common but special speech act in our social daily life. It has its own special purposes and effects. People adopt it to show their conformity to the hearers and further secure his or her self-interests. Though pervasive, it has not attracted much attention from researchers who focus more on the study of compliment. Besides, the insincerity in flattery makes many people hold negative attitudes to such a speech act. The importance of the construction and interpretation has not received enough attention from linguists. Hence a systemic research is necessary with a view to its generation and interpretation.Though the systematic studies are not many, some foreign scholars have made researches from the perspectives of rhetoric, psychology, sociology, and pragmatics. Edward Ellsworth Jones (1964), American social psychologist, makes a series of researches into flattery in his book Ingratiation:a social psychological analysis. He (1964) puts forward the three tactics in ingratiation:other-enhancement, opinion conformity, and self-presentation. He also posits five basic responses that range along a continuum between trust and liking, and mistrust and disliking. The previous studies at home mostly make researches into compliments, a few of which also touch flattery. The studies mainly analyze the realization methods like lexical methods and syntactical methods. To better understand the different responses summarized by Jones and the various realization methods, this thesis will make a study of the generation and interpretation mechanism of flattery.The major questions of the study are as follows:What are the judging standards of flattery? To secure specific self-interest, how does the speaker organize his flattery i.e. what is the generation mechanism like? How does the hearer interpret the flattery and finally fulfill the "specific intentions" of the speaker, i.e. what is the interpretation mechanism like? Why will flattery succeed or fail?The thesis is based on the relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986) and the Idealized Cognitive Model proposed by Lakoff (1987). The thesis chooses the qualitative analysis, and analyzes the merits and limits in applying flattery understanding. The RT theory successfully explains the implicit communicative intention lying in flattery and the ICM theory can explain the generation and interpretation processes in the minds of interlocutors. The reasonability of the two theories applying to flattery makes it possible to integrate the two theories into a new model:RT-ICM. The study extracts the flattery examples from the TV series Eloquent Ji Xiaolan (Tie Chi Tong Ya Ji Xiaolan) and the article A Teaching Text for Flattering on Weibo to detect the applicability of the model with the examples.The study gets the following findings:1) the flatterer utters flattery for his or her self-interest, and the hidden communicative intention and the excessive praises as explicature to secure optimal relevance are two important criteria to judge flattery.2) The generation mechanism of flattery is that the speaker chooses the covert communication, builds one assumptive ICM before and tries to influence the hearer’s cognitive context by manifesting some assumptions. The interpretation mechanism of flattery is that the hearer is used to making least efforts to search for the optimal relevance and build one optimally relevant ICM. If the speaker’s assumptive ICM and the hearer’s ICM constructed is the same, then the implicature CMs will possibly influence the hearer and benefit the speaker in the end.3) The flattery has two effects:flattery success and flattery failure. Flattery succeeds when the speaker’s assumptive ICM and the hearer’s ICM constructed is the same. Flattery fails either because of the cognitive context or because of the difference between the two ICMs.The thesis provides a new perspective—pragmatic-cognitive research of the generation and interpretation mechanism. By implementing RT-ICM, the thesis can explain the different methods of flattery and the different responses to flattery. What is more, the flattery judging standards, generation and interpretation mechanism and the flattery effects can well be accounted for. The thesis has some insights on the research of integration of pragmatics and cognition as well as the study on flattery.