Analysis Of Cognitive Context In Verbal Communication

Communication is one of the most widespread social phenomena of human beings. The communication conducted through language is called verbal communication.It is a highly context-dependent dynamic interactive process.The traditional study of context is static and can not explain the dynamic process.Therefore,this thesis aims to analyze cognitive context during the dynamic and ever-developing communication process, especially,it analyzes cognitive context in the ostensive-inferential communicative model within the framework of Relevance Theory.In linguistic study,cognitive context plays a crucial role.Therefore,a systematic analysis of cognitive context in terms of relevance theory and communication models, especially the ostensive-inferential model,will surely be contributable to the achievement of successful communication.According to Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, human being's verbal communication is a process maneuvered by the elements of cognitive context.In relevance theory,cognitive context refers to a kind of psychological construct,namely,a subset of the hearer's assumption about the world.It is a dynamic and flexible one which is not fixed before communication but is selected by the participants of the communication.Since people have the cognitive competence to understand utterances in communication,their language can be quite brief,concise,and non-trivial because the communicative intention can be inferred by people through cognitive context.Due to the indispensable role of cognitive context in verbal communication,to explore its functions in communication is inevitable.They are elaborated by this thesis from three aspects:constraining verbal communication,making the meaning concrete and eliminating information of redundancy.Firstly,the speaker is restricted by his or her cognitive context to make linguistic choice,such as the choice of language and the manner of speaking.Secondly,cognitive context helps the hearer to make the utterance meaning concrete and to infer the speaker's communicative intention.Thirdly,the cognitive context helps the communicators to eliminate the information of redundancy which appears during the process of communication.As we have mentioned,this thesis aims to analyze cognitive context mainly in the ostensive-inferential communicative model,which could be explored from the speaker's ostension and the hearer's inference.Though there are generally three kind of communication models—code model,inferential model and ostensive-inferential model—the third one is adopted in this thesis.According to the ostensive-inferential communicative model which is put forward within the relevance theory,verbal communication is a kind of activity with ostension and inference.The speaker's ostension can be identified by the hearer only because they have shared common knowledge of cognitive context.Any utterance may have a number of possible interpretations.However, only one of them is most accessible to the hearer because the utterance bears relevance. The speaker will certainly reveal the emphatic parts through a certain ostensive means so that the hearer can perform reasonable inferential tasks.In this sense,ostensive-inferential communication is the two sides of communication:for the speaker,communication is an ostensive process,in which he or she explicitly expresses his or her intention to the hearer; for the hearer,communication is a sort of inferential process,in which he or she must infer what the speaker has intended to express from the information provided by means of ostension.During the process of inference,there is a rule called optimal relevance governing the hearer's choice.The hearer seeks for optimal relevance between the utterance he or she receives and the contextual assumptions.Hence,we can say that the process of utterance interpretation is a process of searching for optimal relevance between newly presented information and its contextual assumption.As all above mentioned,it could be concluded that this thesis aims to elaborate cognitive context within the framework of Relevance Theory from the perspectives of both the speaker and the hearer.Furthermore,communication here is viewed as the process of speaker's ostension and hearer's inference during which reaching optimal relevance is the ideal state.