The Conversational Implicature Interpretation Of Indirect "Request-response" In Cognitive Context

In our daily communication, to build a comfortable and friendly relationship between us in communication, we often choose indirect speech to express something unpleasant and embarrassing. Request and response are the basic and common language forms in our daily communication. Considering face and politeness, the communicators do not always mean what the literal meaning of their request and response. In this situation, the real meaning of an utterance is usually different from what the words explicitly convey. Thus, the conversational implicature in this indirect "request-response" is a topic worth further research. This thesis is going to have a pragmatic analysis on indirect "request─response". It helps people have a clear picture of indirect speech and communication competence improvement.How can the hearers cross the literal meaning of an utterance and interpret the real intended meaning? Relevance theory made an interpretation for us. Relevance theory views communication as a kind of cognitive activity and aims to reveal human communication as an "ostensive-inferential" process from cognitive perspective. This theory provides a powerful theoretical framework for studying the hearer’s interpretation in different cognitive contexts.Indirect "request-response" language mode is also mutual manifestness process of "ostensive─inferential" and it can also produce different conversational implicature. Firstly, after a review of conversational implicature theory and development of relevance theory, this thesis discusses the relevance-theoretic basis closely related to this study such as cognitive context, optimal relevance and inference. The definition of cognitive context, mutual manifestness, dynamic nature of context, the certification and function of optimal relevance as well as the nature and evidence of inference are illustrated. Secondly, the thesis makes a systemic introduction of indirect "request-response". Thirdly, in the paradigmatic aspect, the relevance interpretation of indirect "request-response" is introduced in different cognitive contexts. In the procedure of conversational implicature interpretation, combing with the literal meaning of the utterance, the speaker seeks for optimal relevant assumptions from his cognitive context and makes inferences. That is to say, the speaker tries to find the optional relevance with the contextual assumptions firstly, and then he tries to infer the context implied by cognitive reasoning. After achieving the contextual effects, ultimately communicative success is achieved. In the process of analyzing conversational implicature, an interpretation mechanism based on relevance theory is introduced to explain the hearer’s psychological processing of interpreting conversational implicature. This mechanism fairly reflects the relevance approach to implicature interpretation. It is a procedure involves both decoding and inferential processes. In this procedure, the linguistic meaning initially activates the relevant assumptions in cognitive context. The choice of context is governed by optimal relevance. Taking the combination of linguistic part and contextual part as evidence, the hearer makes inference by means of deductive devices and finally interprets the implicature.