Research On Pragmatic Inferential Mechanism Of Non-conventional Indirect Speech Acts

Searle (1975) classified indirect speech acts into two types: conventional indirect speech acts and non-conventional indirect speech acts. The former refers to those illocutionary acts that have been universally accepted, while the latter refers to those complicated speech acts, which depend much more on the context and must be inferred by means of pragmatic inference. Since non-conventional indirect speech acts are very common in daily communication, a proper pragmatic inference of this kind of speech acts is really important. This paper tentatively studies the pragmatic inferential mechanisms of non-conventional indirect speech acts from a cognitive point of view.Pragmatic inference can be conducted from the macro and the micro perspectives. The former is keen on principle study, while the latter pays more attention to the study of rules judgment within utterance segments. This paper conducts a macro and a micro study of non-conventional indirect speech acts. As far as macro aspect is concerned, the study of inference mechanism is based on conversational implicature theory and relevance theory. When it comes to micro aspect, our study of inference mechanism is based on abduction inference and default inference.The first inference mechanism is based on conversational implicature theory. By using such a mechanism, the reasoner can make a detailed analysis of the inferential "procedures" and "tactics". The second inference mechanism is based on relevance theory. By using such a mechanism, the reasoner can take a full consideration of relevance, and infer the best related implicature through various deductive means. It's obvious to say that, these two mechanisms contribute a lot to improve the practicalness of macro pragmatic inferential mechanisms in implicature inference, but there also exist some weak points arising from the single use of each mechanism. For example, the first mechanism neglects the importance of relevance, while the second mechanism neglects the subjective supplement of the default knowledge. So an efficient inference under micro inferential mechanism is necessary in order to give a better understanding of non-conventional indirect speech acts.This paper puts abduction inference and default inference into the micro inference of non-conventional indirect speech acts. The reasoner can take a retroductive reasoning by means of abduction inference, that is, he can begin his thinking from non-conventional indirect speech acts, and then seek and confirm the most related implicature by effective inferential means. In default inference, the reasoner can draw useful information into use to compensate the blank area by means of various logic inferential tactics. These two micro inferential means are good supplement to macro-inferential mechanisms, but their individual use still causes some one-sided problems. The abduction inference neglects the significance of default knowledge and the default inference doesn't mention the abductive judging rules used in its inferential process, either.Based on what have been discussed above, it can be concluded that, a comprehensive inference of non-conventional indirect speech acts should be conducted in an integral mechanism, which involves a combination of various inferential theories and mechanisms. So inspired by Louis Cummings'elaborative inference and Jiang Yong's blending space theory, this paper conducts the inference of non-conventional indirect speech acts with a new mechanism-Space-integration Inference Mechanism(SIIM). This new mechanism achieves much more improvements concerning its theoretical basis, consisting segments, inferential features and procedures. First of all, SIIM is not limited to one single inferential theory; instead, it makes a full use of various pragmatic theories. Besides, SIIM will conduct an effective inference in three different spaces, namely explicit input space, implicit input space and blending space. And the latter two spaces can take a full consideration of various contextual factors and inferential mechanisms. Thirdly, SIIM generalizes the inferential procedures into two steps:"composition" and "completion and elaboration". And these steps are conducted correspondingly in explicit, implicit space and blending space, which can present a logic and clear inferential procedure.To sum up, the new SIIM aims to make a flexible application of various inferential mechanisms and conduct a comprehensive analysis of non-conventional indirect speech acts effectively.