The Relevance-based Analysis Of Implicatures

This thesis is a study of styles of implicatures in conversational communication. It tries to explain why and how the styles of implicatures vary. Using Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory, this thesis intends to show that implicatures arise in the pursuit of relevance, and result from (a) the speaker's assumptions about the hearer's contextual resources and (b) the degree of trust the speaker places in the hearer's cognitive abilities.There have been a variety of approaches to the analysis of implicatures, the most prominent one is Grice's theory of conversational implicature. However, in the current study, Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory offers the better explanation.Applying Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory, by analyzing the qualitative data collecting by observation and test, it is found that impiicatures vary in the following ways. The more the amount of contextual information that hearer is expected to know and the higher the degree of trust the speaker places in the hearer's cognitive abilities the more implicit the utterance is. On the other hand, the more implicit the utterance is, the less specific the lexical content, the less determinate the speaker's intended meaning, the higher degree of mi sunder standing are and the stronger the additional effects are.In order to test the validity of the above conclusions, a quantitative study is conducted, and the results justify those qualitative analysis.This thesis proposes that in order to enhance our communicative abilities and to eliminate misunderstanding, we should take great care in choosing the styles of implicatures. It also has implications for the study of language learning and teaching.