C-R-A Model: A Tripartite Account Of Verbal Communication

The development of various pragmatic theories, Cooperative Principle (henceforth CP), Relevance Theory (henceforth RT), Adaptation Theory (henceforth AT), to name the main ones, provides a tremendous opportunity for our and any new investigation into communication, whose linguistic, cultural, social, functional, and pragmatic complication calls for more studies for a common, if not identical, understanding of it. The researches from philosophical, cognitive, and societal perspectives, however, indicate that none of them can be considered comprehensive or all-encompassing enough, let alone perfect. Consequently, the three representative theories -- CP, RT and AT -- can only cover a proportion of communication investigation, and in spite of their advantages in accounting for verbal communication, they each have their limitations and deficiencies. To be more specific, CP does not tell us exactly and clearly by what means we can reach implicature. RT tells us how to infer implicature, and it holds that the first interpretation that comes into H's mind is the proper choice, but it is too subjective. However, the problem does not lie in its subjectivity but in that it provides no means to lessen or weaken its subjectivity, namely it has no solution to the indeterminacy of our interpretation. AT only stresses that language use means making linguistic choices, viz. making adaptations to a given context. But what is the basis for such adaptations and what is the direction of adaptation are not made clear. All these problems need to be solved. After analyzing their advantages and disadvantages, we have identified their mutual complementarities and the necessity and possibility of a synthesis of them, which is what this dissertation aims at.This work, therefore, on the basis of the framework of experiential realism, is intended to integrate their merits to construct a new theoretical explanatory framework, called the Cooperation-Relevance-Adaptation Model (C-R-A Model in short) in this dissertation, to account for verbal communication, while minimizing, if not overcoming fundamentally, their respective and common drawbacks. The thesis is inspired by and derived from the following ideas and findings: 1) the limitations of the pragmatic theories; 2) the philosophical basis from the theoretical framework of experiential realism (which is developed into an experiential approach to pragmatics by Marmaridou (2000)); 3) the...