（英语语言文学专业论文）跨文化语用关联—顺应模式.pdf

摘 要 i 摘 要 本文的作者创建了一个跨文化语用关联-顺应模式，并对其进行了语用学理论 的分析和阐释。这个新模式以 sperber the hearer is to find the interpretation that satisfies the expectation of optimal relevance. second, linguistic choices and contextual choices are constantly interadapting with each other in language use on both the production and interpretation sides. when an utterance is chosen, it is very likely to be an integrated process of choice-making, involving language and context at the same time. linguistic and contextual choices are hardly separable, and language use should be regarded as unified and integrated processes of making linguistic and contextual choices at all possible levels. third, in order to achieve successful cross-cultural communication, the communicator should be constantly in the pursuit of optimal relevance. based on the presumption of relevance, which is made during the interadaption process, the speaker decides his particular linguistic style and the hearer finds the interpretation intended by the speaker. finally, the process of a relevance-adaptation involves choosing strategies. english abstract iii speakers do not only choose forms. they also choose strategies. the new model can also be applied to explaining certain issues discussed in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics. the study of speech act has been a hot issue in the sphere of cross-cultural pragmatics. in the light of the cross-cultural pragmatic model of relevance-adaptation, the choice of a particular speech act out of many others is made on the basis of the principle of relevance, involving the communicators adaptation to the three contextual correlates, i.e. physical world, social conventions and psychological motivation. in addition, the new model can give a clear interpretation of the cognitive mechanism of the politeness phenomenon, which is the product of adaptation to social relationships (power, status, identity, etc.) at all language structures: phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic, propositional or textual. keywords: cross-cultural pragmatics; cross-cultural communication; relevance; adaptation; context 湘潭大学湘潭大学 学位论文原创性声明学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的论文是本人在导师的指导下独立进行研究所取 得的研究成果。除了文中特别加以标注引用的内容外，本论文不包含任何其 他个人或集体已经发表或撰写的成果作品。 对本文的研究做出重要贡献的个 人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人完全意识到本声明的法律后果 由本人承担。 作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定，同意学 校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版， 允许论文被查 阅和借阅。 本人授权湘潭大学可以将本学位论文的全部或部分内容编入有关 数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫描等复制手段保存和汇编本学位 论文。 涉密论文按学校规定处理。 作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 导师签名： 日期： 年 月 日 chapter i introduction 1 chapter i introduction sperber the relevance-adaptation integrated processes between linguistic choices and contextual choices; the presumption of relevance: deciding choices of a particular utterance; and the relevance- adaptation: strategy-choosing process. chapter 4 is concerned with the applications of the new model to the studies on speech act and politeness phenomenon. the last chapter is the conclusion, and summarizes the major findings made in the study as well as existent limitations of the present study, and finally gives suggestions for the future work. chapter ii theoretical bases for the model 5 chapter ii theoretical bases for the model anyone who has some experience of living or working with people from different cultural backgrounds knows that in different countries people speak in different ways not only because they use different linguistic codes, involving different lexicons and grammars, but also because they use the codes in different ways. such differences have long been noticed, but the extent of the differences in their ways of speaking has been underestimated in the literature dealing with language use until recent years. “for a long time in the study of language, there has been a very strong interest in formal systems of analysis, often derived from mathematics and logic,” with emphasis on discovering some of the abstract, potentially universal features of language (yule 1996: 6). so do pragmatics theories. in recent years, some anthropologists, ethnographers, sociolinguists, and others doing cross-cultural research based on these assumptions have found that those theories have a western ethnocentric bias and expressed growing doubts about the general applicability of this approach to politeness in comparative studies. the last two decades have witnessed a growing reaction against this kind of misguided universalism, and such reaction has led to the emergence of a new field involving cross-cultural comparison of the applicability of these theories cross-cultural pragmatics. to have a better understanding of the development of cross-cultural pragmatics, it is essential to have a general picture of the development of pragmatics theories since the development of cross-cultural pragmatics is closely related to the theories of general pragmatics. from aristotles theory through to modern semiotics, all theories of communication were based on a single model, which we will call the code model. according to the code model, communication is achieved by encoding and decoding messages. later on, several philosophers, notably paul grice and david lewis, have proposed a quite different model, which we call the inferential model. according to the inferential model, communication is achieved by producing and interpreting evidence. realizing that verbal communication involves both coding and inferential processed, sperber and wilson proposed the ostensive-inferential model, which claims that communication is an ostensive-inferential process. recently, the well-known pragmatist, verschueren advocates that language use is a linguistic adaptation, which contributes a lot to the study of communication. however, all of these theories have their demerits chapter ii theoretical bases for the model 6 and cannot fully elaborate on any aspect of language use. therefore, to provide the right overall framework for the study of communication in general is of great significance. 2.1 code model from aristotles theory to modern semiotics, sperber and therefore, it is a process of pairing signals with messages. in verbal communication, the speaker encodes his thought in the form of phonetic representation and the hearer decodes the thought. the widely quoted diagram of shannon and weaver (1949) shows how communication can be achieved by use of code: fig.1 code model (adapted by shannon the hypothesis that utterances are signals that encode thoughts seems to explain this fact. yet, the code model of verbal communication is only a hypothesis, with well-known merits and rather less chapter ii theoretical bases for the model 7 well-known defects. its main merit is that it is explanatory: utterances do succeed in communicating thoughts, and the hypothesis that they encode thoughts might explain how this is done. its main defect, as it is argued shortly, is that it is descriptively inadequate. in stating what is done and what is meant, the pragmatic factor plays a vital part. while it is reasonable to talk of the grammar of a language as a code and of sentence as encoding their semantic representations, there is no reason to consider that the utterance production is totally determined by the code. utterance production and comprehension involve more than the encoding of a linguistic signal. in one word, the code model fails to explain what contextual factors affect the linguistic choice and thus it falls short of indicating why the speaker chooses to produce such a style. for code theorists, the context used by the hearer should always be identical to the one envisaged by the speaker. can this condition be met? because any two people are sure to share at least a few assumptions about the world, they might be expected to use only these shared assumptions. however, this cannot be the whole answer in that it immediately raises a new question: how the speaker and hearer distinguish the assumptions they share from those they do not? for that, they must make second order assumptions about which first-order assumptions they share; but then they had better make sure that they share these second-order assumptions, which calls for third-order assumptions, and so on indefinitely. assumptions or knowledge of this infinitely regressive sort was often referred to as “common knowledge” and “mutual knowledge.” within the framework of code model, mutual knowledge is a necessity. however, pragmaticians have offered no independent support for the claim that individuals engaging in verbal communication can and do distinguish mutual from non-mutual knowledge. as we know, the mutual knowledge hypothesis is psychologically implausible. the problem with mutual knowledge is not just that humans are incapable of having an infinity of beliefs explicitly represented in their mind. it is also that the infinitely many beliefs which together make up mutual knowledge are not demonstratively inferable from a finite set of premises. 2.2 conversational implicature theory communication is more than the encoding and decoding of a linguistic signal. accordingly, the code model is not a sensible theory for the study of communication. recognizing that language is used in situations and communication is heavily influenced by contextual factors, grice (1975) proposes the conversational implicature chapter ii theoretical bases for the model 8 theory. in rejection of the code model, grice (1957) distinguishes between “natural meaning” and “non-natural meaning”. the “non-natural meaning” is described as follows: s meant something by x is (roughly) equivalent to s intended the utterance of x to produce some effects in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention. in fact, grice shows by this distinction that intentional communication can be achieved in the absence of a code so for as the hearer can recognize the speakers intention. in grices view, communication is achieved if the speaker provides evidence for his intention and the hearer infers this intention from the evidence. grice (1975) holds that the talk exchange is a succession of connected remarks. there is cooperative effort involved in our conversations. each communicator recognizes, to some extent, a common purpose or a set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. this goal or direction may be fixed from the start or it may evolve during the exchange. it may be definite, or it may be indefinite. therefore, there might be a general principle which participants are expected to observe. this is the cooperative principle (cp): make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage of which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. on the assumption that such a general principle is acceptable, one may distinguish four categories under one or another of which fall certain more specific maxims and submaxims. grice calls these categories quantity, quality, relation, and manner. maxims of quantity: 1) make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2) do not make your contribution more informative than is required. maxims of quality: try to make your contribution one that is true. 1) do not say what you believe to be false. 2) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. chapter ii theoretical bases for the model 9 maxims of relation: be relevant. maxims of manner: be perspicuous. 1) avoid obscurity of expression 2) avoid ambiguity 3) be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) 4) be orderly (grice, 1975:45) it is obvious that the cooperative principle is rational. grices basic idea is that in the course of communication, the speaker aims to conform to certain general principle or maximsthe maxim of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance, and clarity. the communication achieves success just because the speaker has observed these maxims. grice (1975) discovers that there are many occasions when people fail to observe the maxims. one of the ways that grice is most interested in is that the speaker may blatantly flout a maxim, not with any intention of deceiving or misleading, but because the speaker wishes to promote the hearer to look for a meaning which is different from, or in addition to, the expressed meaning. this is the occasion on which the conversational implicature occurs. that is, in communication, the speaker can mean much more than his words mean by not observing a maxim, relying on the fact that the speaker has offered the hearer the evidence that the cp has been observed. grices theory is a departure form the code model. evidently, by advocating the cp, grice has shown that contextual factors are essential in both utterance production and interpretation. such a theory has set up the base for an inferential model of communication. even so, there are inadequacies in grices proposals. first, as sperber and wilson (1995:36) point out, it is not clear what rationale lies behind the cooperative principle and maxims. it might be tempting to add a maxim every time a regularity has to be accounted for. one of the key issues has been the question of whether its further refinement would lead to additional maxims as he predicts, or rather to a reduction of the number of maxims, or whether the number of maxims should remain invariant. second, grices theory does not show how the context is activated and how shared information is exploited in communication. to interpret implied meanings, hearers have to make use of contexts. there are a number of contextual factors available to the hearer when he is attempting to interpret the speakers meaning. which context is employed by the hearer and how is such a context evoked? grices theory lacks answers to these chapter ii theoretical bases for the model 10 questions. third, an utterance frequently has a range of possible interpretations; grice, however, did not discuss the possibility that more than one implicature might be intended. if it were indeed the case that an utterance can have only one implicature, how do we know which is the intended implicature? sometimes although the hearer perceives possible alternative interpretations, the context of utterance is such that one interpretation is very much more probable than another. furthermore, grices insight also left some other questions unanswered. there were questions, in particular, about the nature and source of the cooperative principle and maxims. is cooperation essential to communication? do speakers really aim at truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and clarity? what is relevance? grice left these undefined. where do the cooperative principle and maxims come from? are they universal? if so, are they innate? are they culture-specific? if so, why do they vary, and how are they acquired? 2.3 ostensive-inferential model realizing that verbal communication is a complex form of communication and involves both the coding and the inferential processes, sperber and wilson propose the ostensive-inferential model. according to the model, human cognition is relevance- oriented. relevance is not a commodity; it is a property of inputs to cognitive processes. when paying attention to an ordinary phenomenon, the individual may have hopes of relevance. what makes these hopes reasonable is that humans have a number of heuristics, some of them innate, others developed through experience, aiming at picking out relevant phenomena. even so, hopes of relevance sometimes turn out to be unjustified; and when they are justified, they are justified to a greater or lesser extent: there can be no general expectation of a steady and satisfactory level of relevance in individual experience. with an ostensive stimulus, however, the addressee can have not only hopes but fairly precise expectations of relevance. it is manifest that an act of ostensive communication cannot succeed unless the addressee pays attention to the ostensive stimulus. it is also manifest that people will pay attention to a phenomenon only if it seems relevant to them. it is manifest, thenmutually manifest in normal conditionsthat a communicator must intend to make it manifest to the addressee that the ostensive stimulus is relevant to him. in other words, an act of ostensive communication automatically communicates a presumption of relevance. the chapter ii theoretical bases for the model 11 presumption of optimal relevance is expressed in two parts in the following terms (sperber (b) contradicting (providing decisive evidence against) existing assumptions; (c) combining with existing assumptions to yield contextual implications conclusions derivable from input and context together, but from neither input nor context alone. other things being equal, the greater the cognitive effects achieved by processing an input, the greater its relevance. however, the processing of the input, and the derivation of these effects, involve some mental effort. other things being equal, the smaller the processing effort required, the greater the relevance: chapter ii theoretical bases for the model 12 relevance (a) the greater the cognitive effects, the greater the relevance; (b) the smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance. verbal communication, like all ostensive communication, differs from information, one might simply pick up from the environment in that it carries this presumption of optimal relevance. an utterance on a given interpretation is consistent with the principle of relevance if and only if the communicator could rationally have expected it to be optimally relevant to the addressee on that interpretation. this is the crit