A Study On Utterance Meaning In Communication Under Default Semantics Model

The interpretation of utterance meaning in the process of communication has been one of the most important issues in pragmatics. The birth of classical Grice’s conversational implicature has laid a theoretical foundation for this research field, so after Grice there stream many theories concerning the interpretation of utterance meaning, such as, Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, Laurence Horn’s bipartite model and Stephen Levinson’s tripartite model. These theories inherit Grice’s view that communication is not only a matter of encoding and decoding, but also involves inference so that these theories are featured by inference or principle-governed category.However, these theories in the inferentialism camp have been attacked sharply by some other theories in the non-inferentialism camp. Those theories in the non-infernetialism camp cling to the belief that the interpretation of utterance meaning in communication is an automatical, instantaneous and default way. Such theories include Asher and Lascaride’s Discourse Representation Theory, Kent Bach’s Default Reasoning, Francois Recanati’s Automatic Enrichment and K.M.Jaszczolt’s Default Semantics.This dissertation adopts Default Semantics and its core, Merger Representation, as the theoretical framework, and aims to fully elaborate the default feature and default mechanism of natural language through making analyses of utterances in communication.Through analyzing practical utterances in communication, the result shows that the interpretation of utterance meaning in communication is not an inferential process as Grice and his followers advocated, but an automatical, instantaneous and default process. Moreover, Default Semantics successfully elaborates the default feature and default mechanism of natural language, and successfully resolve the dispute between Semantics and Pragmatics which remains unsettled for decades.Finally, this dissertation holds that Default Semantics is a mature theory towards the interpretation of utterance meaning in pragmatics, and by focusing on it, it will pave a new way for pragmatic research.