Study Of Cognitive Context

Cognitive context is a concept of vital importance in pragmatics. Based on the contemporary research results both in China and abroad, this thesis takes a multidisciplinary approach by integrating important views in cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, logic and artificial intelligence, and attempts to construct an overall and systematic theoretical framework of cognitive context with such dimensions as basic features, psychological representation, constructive integration and functional realization.This thesis began with a systematic review over the contemporary researches on cognitive context in China and abroad, and then redefined it in order to solve the problems existing in the present definitions, and meanwhile processed it through formalization. On the basis of the new definition, the author put forward such concepts as ostensive context and default context, emphasized the equal importance of the two, and elaborated on the gestalt, dynamic and humanistic natures of cognitive context with illustrations of ample Chinese language data.Having differentiated some concepts related to schema, this thesis distinguished cognitive schemata into concept, role, surroundings, procedure and emotional schemata from the perspective of content, and auditory, visual and structural schemata from the perspective of form. It further came up with the view that cognitive schemata are the psychological representations of cognitive context, and through positivistic investigation, statistical analysis and x~2 test, it moved on the studies of the consistencies and differences of cognitive schemata among different social groups.Based on Kintsch's CI(Construction-Integration Model), this thesis illustrated the process of construction and integration of cognitive context as a psychological construct. The basis of construction is the physical environment of speech communication, communicators' cognitive schemata and their cognitive abilities, and the perspective of construction is subjectivity, inter-subjectivity and inter-subjective-objectivity. This process goes through the following four stages: pattern recognition, schema activation, knowledge selection and hypothesis formation. In the first stage, the model of template Matching can be used to explain the recognition of patterns and fuzzy patterns. In the second stage, stimuli and cognitive schemata are the two types of key materials in schema activation. External stimuli activate cognitive schemata through cognitive nodes which generally consist of the key words in communication. In the third stage, the form of stimuli, the frequency of knowledge points, the intimate emergence of the present utterances and the subject's cognition hold sway over knowledge selection. In the last stage, the subject sets out from an overview and makes the final construction and integration according to the previous three stages, resulting in a complete contextual hypothesis which in turn offers the premise for cognitive inferences.Finally, the thesis probed into the functional realization of cognitive context. On the basis of Reiter's model of default reasoning, a new modal operator has been introduced, and a cognitive model of default reasoning has been proposed. According to this model, the subject can determine the degree of priority through default dominance, knowledge channeling and subjective accommodation. In this thesis, the author also attempted to introduce the multi-agent epistemic system into the reasoning process and put forward the theory that communication is a multi-agent reasoning system of mutual knowledge.