On Adaptation-Relevance Model

This paper is a study of the newly proposed Adaptation-Relevance Model, which is the most convincing and comprehensive communicative model with a view of explaining both language production and interpretation in language use. And the analysis of the conversations in TV interview programs by using this new model can serve as the valid and powerful support to the rationality and validity of this model.The theoretical framework is the newly proposed communicative model—Adaptation-Relevance Model. Though pragmatists have long been making researches into the mechanism of utterance production and interpretation and many different theories and models have been proposed, few of them are adequately convincing. This paper first reviews some related communicative models which have produced profound influence on the pragmatic field. The models referred to in this paper are Code Model, Conversational Implicature Model, Relevance Theory, Adaptation Theory and Adaptation-Relevance Model. As the initial effort to probe the essence of communication, Code Model paved the way for the academic research of human communicative model. According to this model, language is a kind of shared code, and people have to know the code first in order to communicate with others. Knowing the code that is shared code is the premier of communication. Knowing the code may ensure you that you know the semantic meaning of it, but it does not necessarily follow that you know the speaker's meaning of the code. The meaning of an utterance involves so many factors that the notion of code can not well explain the essence of communication. Then Grice's Conversational Implicature made a further effort and proposed a complex series of principles for inferring the speaker's meaning. But those principles are just so complicated that it is not consistent with the genuine process of human communication in our daily life. People can successfully communicate with others without knowing any of the maxims presented in the theory. Thus this theory is also turned down by people. Relevance Theory offers a new approach to the research of verbal communicationwith the basic assumption about human's cognition. It claims that human's cognition is relevance oriented and thus verbal communication is to seek optimal relevance. With its overwhelming theoretical explaining power, this theory is also not convincing enough for its lack in description of the process of seeking relevance. Adaptation Theory claims that language is a kind of tool which has a close relationship with society, culture and psychology. It provides us a comprehensive perspective to the use of language with a detailed description of the process of language production and interpretation. However, this theory has its demerits. It lacks a general principle governing the whole process of adaptation and also it does not elaborate on the interpretation side in detail as it does on the production side. Inspired by both the Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory, some Chinese scholars proposed another approach to the communicative model. They combined the two previous models together and thus this new model is called Adaptation-Relevance Model. Derived from the Ostensive-Inferential Model and the Adaptation Model, this new model claims that verbal communication aims at seeking optimal relevance. The seeking of relevance results from the inter-adaptation between linguistic structures and contextual correlates. And the seeking of relevance is a dynamic process in which both the speaker and hearer have to make efforts to achieve a successful communication. The main claims of this model can be manifested as:First, the purpose of communication for both speaker and hearer is to seek optimal relevance. Since human's cognition is relevance-oriented, people will pay attention to the phenomenon which seems to be relevant to them. Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. The speaker's task is to make sure that the interpretation he intends to convey is consistent with the principle of relevance; otherwise he runs the risk of not being properly understood. The hearer's task is to find the interpretation which is consistent with the principle of relevance; otherwise he runs the risk ofmisunderstanding or not understanding it at all.Second, the process of adaptation-relevance is a dynamic inter-adaptation between linguistic structures and contextual correlates. In addition, the purpose of this inter-adaptation is to seek relevance. And the purpose of this inter-adaptation is to seek optimal relevance. For the speaker, the choice of a particular utterance should adapt to the contextual correlates about the hearer so that the utterance is relevant enough; for the hearer, he should adapt his cognitive contexts to the linguistic choices of the speaker in order to infer the speaker's intention by seeking the optimal relevance of the utterance.Third, the communicator's presumption of relevance decides his choice of a particular utterance. The presumption of relevance is made during the process of adaptation, and it is the product of adapting his linguistic behavior to those contextual correlates consistent with the principle of relevance.Finally, the process of adaptation-relevance involves choosing strategies. Speakers choose not only forms but also strategies. The non-existence of one-to-one form-function mapping suggests the presence of some motivation behind linguistic choices. Basically, choices of linguistic forms for the same communicative functions represent different interpersonal considerations. There are a whole array of social variables like age, sex, status and the like influencing linguistic choices at various levels.Adaptation-Relevance Model combines Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory together and offers us a more comprehensive perspective on the communicative model. It seems that the framework proposed in this new model is much more convincing than any model in the previous theories.TV interview program is chosen as the data resource of this paper because the conversation in TV interview is a typical kind of communication between the speaker and the hearer, and determined by the style and character of this kind of program, the communication in TV interview program is much more likely successful than otherkinds of conversation in our daily life, so the results of the analysis of this kind of communication may help people realize the essence of human communication, reveal their intuition of language use, promote their pragmatic awareness and competence, and improve their linguistic and pragmatic performance. From the literature review on conversational analysis of the TV interview programs, the author discovers that though many scholars have made some researches on this field, they just analyzed the conversations of TV interviews from one aspect and did not make a comprehensive description of the process. This may partially be due to the inadequate explanatory power of the theories that they used in the process of analysis. So it is necessary to try to use another theory to study it. The data from the TV interview programs are analyzed under Adaptation-Relevance Model from three aspects: the dynamic notion of contexts; the inter-adaptation between the linguistic structure and the contextual correlates; the dynamic production of meaning. All these three aspects are the claims of Adaptation-Relevance Model. Adaptation-Relevance Model can well explain the process of communication in the TV interview programs. Therefore, this analysis has a mighty power to support the rationality of Adaptation-Relevance Model.At last, some general guides are drawn from the research for how to conduct well in our daily communications.