A Pragmatic Study Of Attitudinal Meaning From Relevance Theory

Communicative intention is a key in the smooth running of communications.This paper takes the view that attitude acts as a pragmatic outerwear in inferringcommunicative intention. The research on attitudinal meaning (AM for short) beginsin psychology, centering on the relation between behaviours and attitudes. Then,linguists start to pay attention to AM. Their studies are mainly from three aspects,namely, the relationship between phonetics and AM, the relationship betweengrammar and AM, and the relationship between lexis and AM. However, the elementswhich can convey AM do not have a clear or systematic classification. To fill the gap,Martin&White (2005) propose Appraisal Theory (AT for short), which makes a clearclassification of attitudinal words, and leads the studies on AM into the field of howwords, especially attitudinal ones, express attitudes. Thus, most of the latest studies onattitudinal resources go to the field of lexis.Based on the previous studies, this paper attempts to summarize the semantic,grammatical and formal features of AM, in order to make a wider and deeperunderstanding on AM and attitudinal resources. By analysing the features of AM,attitudinal resources become clearer. Thus, the speaker can express his attitude moreclearly, and the hearer can catch the speaker’s attitude more exactly.Then under the guidance of Relevance Theory (RT for short), together with thefeatures of AM, this paper tries to analyse the generation and construal of AM by casestudies, including the effects of qinaide (dear) as an address form, taoyan (I hate you)as a coquetry, hai huo zhe ya (still alive)? as an off-record greeting, and Gelaozi(damn it) as a pseudo-curse on AM conveying, and Joyce Kilmer’s AM in his lyricTrees. In case studies, two views—the speaker’s view and the hearer’s view areadopted. From the view of speaker, analysis centers on how AM is expressed, andfrom the view of hearer, analysis focuses on how AM is construed. According toostensive-inferential process, communicative intention can be inferred by theinformative intention. And in the process of recognizing the speaker’s communicative intention, AM serves as a pragmatic outerwear, which can verify the inferring ofcommunicative intention in return. The communication succeeds when the speakerand the hearer agree with each other on AM. In the present study, communicativeintention can be reflected by the features of AM, or to say attitudinal resources. Thespeaker expresses his communicative intention by attitudinal resources, and the hearerinfers the speaker’s communicative intention by the manifest attitudinal resources.Therefore, from the perspective of RT, together with the features of AM, thispaper makes a relatively comprehensive analysis on the generation and construal ofAM. And this research discovers that:1) AM can be expressed by both affectivevocabulary and non-affective vocabulary;2) AM can be conveyed not only bylinguistic means, but also by non-linguistic means; and3) AM acts as a pragmaticouterwear of construing the speaker’s communicative intention, and constitutes as partof the communicative intention.