（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）运用问题解决理论解释语言理解的过程.pdf

iii 摘摘 要要 交际是人类最普遍的社会现象之一，无论是物质生活，还是社会精神生活，人 们都离不开相互接触，离不开交际。所以说，运用语言进行交际是人类最基本，最 重要的一种生存能力和社会行为。而准确地理解语言是交际正常进行的前提条件。 因此，在日常交际中，语言理解的过程是非常重要的。这是因为人类是一种复杂的 动物，人类的思维难以琢磨，而我们要生存，每天都需要和人进行交际。在交际中， 时刻都在进行着从说话人到听话人的角色的转变。因此，能否准确的理解说话人的 含义就显得更加重要了。所以，本文将选择话语理解作为研究对象进行研究。从心 理学的角度，运用问题解决理论来进行研究。 问题解决是人类思维活动的一种普遍形式，长期以来受到了广泛的关注。要研 究问题解决，首先要明确什么是问题。按照现代认知心理学的理解，问题就是指在 给定的信息和目标状态之间有某些障碍需要加以克服的情境。具体来说，当一个人 希望达到某一个目标，但又没有可以供使用的现成方法时，这个人就面临一个问题。 而问题解决是一系列的有目的指向性的认知操作活动过程。这是认知心理学家公认 的问题解决定义。近年来，该理论在教学领域已引起了相当的重视，并且已与数学， 体育等学科形成了密切的联系。然而在外语语言研究方面语用学领域，至今仍没 有得到研究与应用。 本文将运用问题解决理论来解释语言理解的过程，运用问题解决的思维过程分 步骤地解决人类理解语言的过程，把人类的语言理解过程看成是一个不断地发现问 题，提出问题，分析问题，解决问题的过程。在文章中，我们将采用心理学中普遍 适用的问题解决理论框架，提出运用问题解决理论来解释语言理解过程的理论框架 为：发现问题阶段，分析问题阶段，提出假设阶段，检验假设阶段。通过运用该理 论，我们对收集到的大量语料进行了阶段性的分析。期望通过该研究，能够将问题 解决理论充分地运用于语用学，使该理论在语用学领域得到研究。 通过研究，我们发现：本研究首次将问题解决理论同语用学相联系。这不仅拓 展了问题解决理论的研究，同时，也对语用学的研究做出了贡献。对于语言学的研 究者和学习者而言， 将问题解决理论运用于语用学中，这将使我们的研究提高到了 iv 更高的层次。而且，在今后的研究中，问题解决理论的各个步骤以及策略将得到更 广泛的运用，它将会帮助我们来解决我们所遇到的语用学问题。 关键词关键词：问题解决；语言理解；思维 i abstract communication is the most common phenomenon of human beings in the social life. people not only have to communicate with others in their material life, but at the same time they also have something to do with others in the spiritual world. understanding the conversations is accurately the precondition of accomplishing the communication successfully. therefore, the process of utterance interpretation is very important in our daily life. this is because human beings are very complex animals and their thinking is difficult to digest. however, people have to live and communicate with others everyday. during the communication, we need to shift our roles from listener to speaker all the time. consequently, precisely to express the speakers meaning becomes outstandingly important. therefore, in this thesis, utterance interpretation will be regarded as the subject of study, and problem-solving theory will be put into the research from the perspective of psychology. problem-solving theory is a common form of human thinking which has been paid more attention for a long time. in order to solve the problem, people need firstly make clear that what problem it is. according to the modern cognitive psychology, the problem is the barriers that need to be overcome between the given information and target state. in particular, when someone hopes to achieve a certain goal but lack of available methods to use, he or she may face a problem, and the problem-solving is a cognitive operation of a series of goal directing activities. this is the definition of problem-solving accepted by the cognitive psychologists. in recent years, this theory in teaching has attracted much attention, and also gotten close relationship with mathematics, sports and so on. however, there is rarely any research or application of problem-solving theory in the field of the study of foreign language-pragmatics. in this article, it will use the problem-solving theory to explain the process of language comprehension, and at the same time apply the problem-solving thinking process to solve it step by step. the process of language comprehension is regarded as a process continuously finding problems, analyzing problems and making hypothesis and testing the ii hypothesis. in this thesis, it will use the general theoretical framework of problem-solving in psychology, and generalize the framework of applying the problem-solving theory to the utterance interpretation as the following: identifying problems stage, analyzing problems stage, proposing hypothesis stage and testing hypothesis stage. by the use of this theory, this thesis has done a series of analysis of the collected corpus stage by stage. it is expected that the apply the problem-solving theory to the pragmatics through this research, and as well make it a further development in the pragmatics. we have reached the conclusion after the study. that is, utterance interpretation by the use of problem solving theory for the first time links the problem-solving and pragmatics. it not only extends the range of problem-solving research, but also contributes to the study of pragmatics. for the learners and researchers of the linguistics, the problem-solving application to the pragmatics promotes the study to a higher level. all the stages of the problem-solving theory and the strategies that have been used in the interpretation will be used widely in further research, and people will adopt the problem solving theory when they encounter with pragmatics difficulties. key words: problem solving； utterance interpretation；mind 1 chapter one introduction 1.1 the object of the present research as we all know, utterance interpretation plays an essential role in the daily communication. most of our daily communications are on oral. communication is an important way to transfer and obtain messages. communication, is constantly talking among two or more parts who take part in the conversation. people can exchange their ideas and transfer the information by speaking. however, we cannot always understand speakers intention while communicating. the reason is that the content of peoples conversation delivered during their communication is different. it can be divided into two categories: the content which is spoken straightforward and the obscure one. in other words, people do not always say things directly but tend to imply them in their daily conversations. therefore, the process of understanding utterance is extremely important. utterance interpretation is a cognitive psychology process which is complicated. this kind of complexity refers to the following two parts. the first one is that the communication is restricted by talking backgrounds, the factor of society and culture. in the specific communication environment, the listeners contextual assumption and reasoning ability which is depended on by the discourse management of the speaker is the other part. as the object of paper, utterance interpretation is a common phenomenon in our daily communication. how to give a correct understanding of the meaning of the speaker is an extremely important factor during communication. 1.2 the rationale of the research to chose such a topic the application of problem-solving theory in the utterance interpretation as a thesis mainly based on several reasons as follows: firstly, to understand the utterance correctly is extremely important and it will affect the success of the communication. secondly, utterance interpretation has always been regarded as a very important area of research in pragmatics for a long time. some pragmatic theories are used in the 2 utterance interpretation, such as conversational implicature and cooperative principle of grice, speech act theory and other relevant theory. all of these have made great outstanding contributions to the utterance interpretation. however, any theory has its own shortcomings. in order to make up its deficiencies, this thesis has proposed the application of problem-solving theory in the psychology on the utterance interpretation. thirdly, problem-solving theory has been used widely in recent years. in education, it has been paid much attention and contacted with the subject of teaching. the practice has showed that this theory has a high logical objective which may assist in the teaching and reach good achievements. and the way of its thinking will help us to solve all the problems that we encountered. so far, in the foreign language study-as in the pragmatics, there is still no reference of this theory. therefore, it is expected to explain the process of language understanding by the application of problem-solving theory step by step, and have to service the research of pragmatics by its advantages. 1.3 unsolved problems in the existing studies scholars have made many researches on the utterance interpretation from different angles, but there are still some problems. firstly, in the doctrine of conversational implicature of grice, the listener needs to do a multi-level discourse processing if the words showed non-literal meaning. according to the conversation, we should firstly get the literal meaning and then do a process of the literal meaning and then tear down the meaning according to the literal meaning, in this way we can ultimately obtain the intention of the communication. it is a complex process. secondly, whether it is anyone in the following documents, the pragmatic inference and process that was used in the reassert of utterance interpretation are complex and targeted weak. 1.4 the objective of the study the objectives of this research are the following: 3 firstly, by the use of problem-solving in the psychology, the research of utterance interpretation has widened its range. in other words, the combination of the two subjects has promoted the study of pragmatics. secondly, through the application of problem-solving theory to the language understanding, learners can develop a good habit of thinking, which may help the learners to use the thinking of problem-solving to do the research in their further study-identifying the problem, analyzing the problem, making hypotheses and testing the hypotheses. 1.5 procedure and data collection in the study, i do the analysis on the amount of collected corpus by the use of problem-solving theory. in the study, there are some data collections of daily communication. the data are mainly from the following three parts: firstly, it is actually the real communication. during my thesis writing, i have paid more attention to the dialogue in the daily life. therefore, i have regarded the real communication as the corpus study. secondly, it is from books or magazines that i have read before. during the corpus collection, i have recorded some interesting dialogues for the later research. thirdly, it also adopted some examples of pragmatics books. the previous studies of utterance interpretation are mainly from the perspective of pragmatics and it has rich corpus. moreover, this article is from the perspective of psychology which may do the analyzing by the aid of some relevant knowledge in pragmatics. 4 chapter two literature review 2.1 introduction as the most common phenomenon of human society, utterance interpretation arouses interests of linguists, but at the same time attracts people attention of philosopher, sociologists, and psychologists. they do the research of the language from different angles with various methods which greatly promote the development of language communication. in recent years, scholars from domestic and overseas have acquired great achievements in the pragmatic study of understanding utterances. this thesis will give a chiefly review on the study of this field from the following three perspectives, including the perspective of pragmatics, the perspective of ethics and the perspective of education. 2.2 pragmatic approach it has viewed the previous studies on utterance interpretation from the perspective of pragmatics which lies on two aspects. one is the three major theories：the theory of conversational implicature (grice 1967) and cooperative principle，speech act theory and relevance theory. the other one is about the research on utterance interpretation from the view of text. 2.2.1 review from three theories this part is from the three important theories of pragmatics to make a review of utterance interpretation, which concludes the theory of conversational implicature (grice 1967) and cooperative principle，speech act theory and relevance theory. and it is mainly the contributions and deficiencies of each theory. 5 2.2.1.1 review from the theory of conversational implicature and cooperative principles the theory of conversational implicature (grice 1967), is a kind of doctrine of natural language understanding, and the implied meaning derived from verbal communication is called “conversational implicature” by grice. meanwhile, he has put forward an assumption that how people understand the implied meaning behind the conversation: if we do some pragmatic inference of the “cooperative principles” that grice has proposed, people will deduce the implied meaning which transcend the literal meaning. cooperation is regarded as the first essential principle of conversations. this is because that people talk with implications and try to hint something behind the lines while they are talking. this kind of implication needs pragmatic analysis which can not be interpreted by the general semantics theory. during the process of comprehension, we need the support of common knowledge, reasoning ability and so on. however, the most important precondition is that the participants of the talking must have the desire to continue their conversation, in other word they should have cooperation attitude. under this condition, the listener could sort out the relationship between the discourses of words, asking and answering, and context relation, and then make a reasoning assumption. “grice believes that in all the communications, there is a specific principle between the speaker and listener to observe in order to achieve the goal. grice called it as cooperation principle in conversations”. ( he zhaoxiong 2000:154). 2.2.1.1.1 the contribution of theory to utterance interpretation the theory of conversational implicature and cooperative principle that proposed by “grice has made great influence on the study of pragmatics. this proposition has brought about the study of pragmatic inference and natural language comprehension”. (he ziran, ran yongping 1988:109) he has made great contribution to the study of pragmatics. grice emphasized the implied meaning of cooperative principle. and he proposed that pragmatic inference should be what we depend on in the language interpretation of the implied meaning during communication. the purpose of the theory of conversational implicature 6 lies on that people always believe that they should cooperate with others and follow some principles when they are talking. if one party of the communications do some violation of the discourse principles of cooperation, he might intentionally do in this way, and the other side of the cooperation must deduce the intention of the violation of the counterpart according to the context. the cooperation principle of communication which is put forward by grice stressed the implications of communication. in his view, implication understanding during the discourse is not on language decoding but on the pragmatic inference. pragmatic reasoning is based on the context and general principle of communication. 2.2.1.1.2the deficiencies of the theory to utterance interpretation in grices cooperative principles, its various criterions are not the logical outcomes of the cooperative principles but just some special cases and which cannot explain everything. under some special circumstances, there is no need to define these standards which are not only existent (he ziran, ran yongping 1988:109). wilson has proposed his query of the cooperative principles (wilson, deirdre moreover, the greater of the context effects, the stronger of the relevant of the assumption”( sperberwilson 1986: 122-125). thirdly, mutually manifest of the facts in communication is an objective reality, but the degree is various on different people. therefore, there may be a variety of 11 understandings of the same sentence; sperber and wilson believed that such standard of utterance interpretation is human cognition hypothesis and people will always follow the relevant principles when they are cognizing the outside. as the language communication for example, what the participants said should has something to do with the whole topic or the presentation of the last one; people try to grasp the intention of the speaker just according to the relevant messages among the discourses. they also believed that the process of utterance interpretation is not only a process of reasoning, but also an ostensive-inference. just as what has been described above, the standard of utterance interpretation is human cognitive assumptions, and it is also means the principles of association called by sperber and wilson. in other words, the standard of utterance interpretation is consistently with the principles of relevance: only if the words of the speaker have provided the best correlation, the listener will make a correct understanding of the conversations. the best relative condition of utterance interpretation is the achievement of contextual effects. as we assumed that the listeners always start from a small range of context in our utterance interpretation. for example, we begin to speculate and analyze from the context which was provided by the speakers previously, and then try to make sure that the current discourse may get its context effects. of course, ineffective of the context may affect the utterance interpretation. in this way, the listener will pay more effects to broaden the context when they are speculating or reasoning, so that the relationship between the discourse and context will get a best connection, and ultimately we will understand the speakers intention correctly. 2.2.1.3.3 deficiencies of the theory to utterance interpretation just as the saying goes: “every coin has two sides”, although the theory has made significant contribution to the study of utterance interpretation, there are still shortages which need a further development. “wilson and sperber considered the relevance of discourses as an inevitable outcome, the results of utterance interpretation is determined by the cognitive subject during the discourse of the communicati