| Loose talk is a common phenomenon in our daily conversation, and it refers to those utterances that lack literal precision. This essay tries to approach the problem how loose talk is understood on the basis of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory and meanwhile tries to offer a thorough comprehension of relevance theory itself. As relevance theory is developed from Grice's conversational implicature theory, the understanding of loose talk is firstly viewed in Grice's sense. It turns out that Gricean pragmatics, especially the Maxim of Quality, the most important maxim in his Cooperative Principle, does not work efficiently in explaining those literally untrue language phenomena. Thus relevance theory is appealed to to solve some problems raised by Gricean approach. According to relevance theory, any utterance can only be a resemblance to the speaker's original thoughts, no matter whether it is a loose talk, a literal talk or some figurative talk. We reach the conclusion that it is not truthfukiess which has been over-emphasized by Grice's Maxim of Quality or certain approximate truthfulness but relevance that is expected by the hearer from the speaker's utterance. Then this essay offers detailed demonstrations ofloose talk and some other language uses, e.g., literal talk and tropes, and confirms the efficiency and value of relevance theory. Though the uses of language vary, the understanding of them is always guided by its relevance, or to be more accurate, its optimal relevance, in its particular context. The literal imprecision of loose talk doesn't mean that the language used in it is vague. Loose talk and vague language are two different categories. In this essay, we make a distinction between them. What's more, we also try to throw light on some cases of vague language from relevance-theory-based point of view, and conclude that what is pursued in using vague language is relevant approximation. In order to offer a relatively thorough understanding of relevance theory and conversational implicature theory, some necessary theoretic supplement is given in the end, which includes different theoretic origins of these two theories and the revision made to Grice's pragmatic theory by relevance theory. Relevance theory is a brilliant and enlightening theory, it contributes a. lot to pragmatics and linguistics as well, and its applicability in interpreting a wide range of language uses has been testified. Relevance theory can also give us some enlightment in our daily communication in the native language or a secondlanguage. |
