Chinese Contemporary Landscape Design Research Under Relevance Theory

Abstract:With the confrontation of globalization and modern culture, the language of China’s contemporary landscape design is showing the tendency of alogia, which has caused a fight between Chinese and western designing, as well as traditional and modern designing. The works which can reflect Chinese modern design are fewer and fewer. The regional and cultural characteristics of china’s contemporary landscape design has fading slowly and swamped into a confused place because of the difference of time,force of margin and disagree of aesthetical standard. Chinese local language has been unilaterally digested and forgotten slowly, we are lack of a set of language which belongs to Chinese own culture. How to create Chinese contemporary landscape designing language under this complicated circumstance has became a needed research projects.Pragmatics is a practical subject which is about the usage and understanding of language. Discourse generation and discourse understanding in certain context are studied in this subject. This research is trying to provide a reference in design practice by discussing about "Chinese expression" in Chinese contemporary landscape designing pragmatics strategy.This paper consists of four main parts. First, it studied about landscape language pragmatics and relevance theory, which provides the fundamental basis of landscape status analysis and pragmatic strategy. Second, it analyzed the pragmatics failures in Chinese contemporary landscape design and highlighted cultural identify crisis, and then explained the reason of pragmatic failures from the perspective of cognitive context and reasoning process. Third, in this paper I presented two important principles about landscape design pragmatics based on Chinese contemporary landscape design pragmatics strategy explore in relevance theory. And I supported the structure of Chinese contemporary landscape design pragmatics from three levels of landscape vocabulary, spatial grammar construct and landscape semantic orientation, which completed the transformation of landscape pragmatics from epistemology to methodology. At last, I tested the strategy by taking Yanmen Park in Huaihua as an example of landscape planning and design.This research took relevance theory in pragmatics as an entry point and deeply analyzed current situation and problems in contemporary landscape design. I presented that Chinese contemporary landscape design language is neither a plagiarism of western discourse nor a copy of traditional language. It is an idea that rooted in this area. In this paper I introduced pragmatics theory to landscape, which enriched the point of views in solving our problems and also provided motivation to help Chinese contemporary landscape design get out of the control of western strong discourse and classic traditional discourse.