A Cognitive Study Of The Active Components Of Context In Conversation

As one of the important concept in linguistic study, context has been studied in many fields for a long time. Many scholars contribute a great deal to the investigation of the decisive role of context in meaning construction and interpretation. Traditional study of context has paid much attention to the influence of external factors and viewed context as a static entry existing in human being’s mind before communication. With the development of cognitive science, people begin to research context from the perspective of psychology. And compositionally analyzable as context turns out to be, there must be the contextual components engaged in the process of meaning construction. Meanwhile, due to various factors, components enjoy different status in conversation in terms of the degree of activation. Thus the present study makes research on the active components in conversation and attempts to disclose the mechanism of the activation.The research on active components tentatively adapts the theory of coherence lines, investigating the conversation and finding out that contextual components are activated by contextual triggers. And the active triggers are classified into the explicit and implicit ones in terms of the explicit and the implicit coherence. On the other hand, contextual triggers will be activated among two or more tracks of coherence lines, correspondingly they are classified into single-track triggers and multi-track triggers. Therefore, hierarchies of contextual components are determined by the kind of triggers that activate them and activity of contextual components is calculated with a coefficient in terms of coherence lines as well. Furthermore, the present thesis reflectively investigates the relevant factors that dynamically and interpedently influence the activation.This research consists of five chapters and the main contents are as follows. Chapter One is the introduction of the reason for choosing this topic and the logic premises of the research, the corresponding research questions, the significance of the paper as well as its structures. Literature review constitutes Chapter Two, which is mainly about the development of the theory of context, with a detailed study on the representative researchers, from the traditional views to the cognitive studies, concluding that the cognitive context is participants’dynamic online construct of all the cognitive representation of the world, which involves the construed minds of others. Chapter Three presents a clear idea about the activation of the contextual components based on the comprehensive understanding of cognitive context and the theory of coherence lines, disclosing the mechanism of the activation, presenting the coefficient of calculating the activity of the components and the influential factors affecting the activation. With the disclosure of the mechanism of active components in cognitive context, Chapter Four further analyzes the active components with the mechanism disclosed in the concrete conversation of a civil case in court. Chapter Five is mainly to point out the findings, limitations and prospects of the study.