| Philosophers and linguists have long before noticed the phenomenon that there is a gap between what people say and what they really mean. To account for this, many linguists proposed different theories from different perspectives, of which Grice's theory of implicature and Relevance Theory (RT) by Sperber and Wilson are well-known to us. This thesis is a tentative endeavor to make a comparative study on the two theories and to form a conclusion.To start with, the thesis makes a literature review of the two theories in Chapter Two. In 1957 Grice distinguished between what he called natural meaning and non-natural meaning. Natural meaning is the kind of meaning literally conveyed through conventional words, while non-natural meaning is the meaning over and above what is literally meant with conventional words, of which Grice showed concern with the latter and formed the theory of conversational implicature in 1967 on the basis of it. He suggested that rational communicators are assumed to obey the Cooperative Principle (CP) and its maxims to achieve a successful communication. If the communicators disobey or flout CP and its maxims, conversational implicature will be generated. Grice classified implicatures into conventional implicature and conversational implicature, of which he further divided the latter into particularized and generalized one. RT disregards that there are CP and its maxims in communication and holds that human cognition is relevance-oriented. On relevance-theoretic account, in communication process, human has the intuition to relevance and communication is relevance-oriented. Communicators have tendency and intuition to relevance and can -identify between the relevant (strong) information and irrelevant (weak) information. RT makes a cognitive approach to probe communication process on the basis of the cognitive principle of relevance, the communicative principle of relevance andostensive-inferential communication model.After a brief documentation of the two theories, in Chapter Three the author makes a comparative study concentrating on the following four aspects: (1) CP and two principles of RT. Grice regards that CP and its subordinate maxims are the fundamental principle of verbal communication. If the communicators do not obey, namely violate or flout this principle, conversational implicature comes into being; Sperber and Wilson maintain that there is no rules or maxims in the communication process, and that the expectations of relevance raised by utterances are precise enough. They hold the belief that the cognitive principle of relevance and the communicative principle of relevance are key to illustrating the cognitive process of communication, and that the two principles of relevance are not maxims or rules that speakers can obey or violate but a simple description of what happens in communication; (2) What is said/ what is implicated and explicatures/ implicature: in accordance with Grice, a speaker's meaning consists of what is said and what is implicated by an utterance. What is said is ' closely related to the conventional meaning of the words'; what is implicated is Grice's major concern in his theory, which can be classified into conventional implicature and conversational implicature. Grice is inquired on account of his conventional implicature and 'making as if to say'. On relevance-theoretic account, the speaker's meaning consists of explicit content (explicature), context and implicit content (implicature). For communicators the first step identifying the explicature is a combination of decoding and inference, while the second step inferring the implicature is a matter of identifying implicit premises and implicit conclusions; (3) Role of the context in the two theories: Grice supplies no more detailed illustration on context although it plays a major role in the notion of particularized conversational implicature. In RT, context is regarded as contextual assumption, which plays an essential role in probing the communication process. Con... |
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