The Relevance-theoretical Approach To Context And Its Implications For Teaching Reading

Pragmatics, the study of the context-dependent aspects of utterance interpretation, has developed rapidly during the last thirty years. Relevance theory (RT henceforth), presented most fully in Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986), written by Sperber and Wilson, is a new approach to pragmatics, an approach to communication and utterance understanding based on a general view of cognition. It draws central attention to the role of contextual inference and provides the powerful account for the nature of context from the dynamic point of view. However, just as Levinson (1989:456) pointed out, Relevance and the subsequent comments have only to do with the abstract theory itself, and it is "not clear how it could be made to have empirical application" to teaching. Such being the case, I choose The Relevance-theoretical Approach to Context and Its Implications for Teaching Reading as my thesis topic. By studying the relevance-theoretical approach to context, I hope that the thesis may be helpful in further deepening the study of reading, and it may be a comprehensive guideline for the practice of teaching reading.Sperber and Wilson (S&W henceforth) reject the picture of context as monolithic entity that is accessible to interlocutors beforehand during interaction. Instead, they propose a much more dynamic view of context as a construct that has to be established and developed in the course of interaction in order to select the correct interpretation: " a context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer's assumptions about the world" (S&W, 1986:15). As to the basis of utterance interpretation, S&W propose an alternative notion of mutualmanifestness to the traditional mutual knowledge in order to avoid its endless recursion of assumptions. People make different representations of their surrounding reality. These representations are called cognitive environments in RT's terminology. They are created through the addition of facts that are manifest to the individual. In the course of interaction, speakers are open to a great amount of contextual information and assumptions that are mutually manifest to both, and therefore a mutually manifest cognitive environment is created. This gives us a picture of conversation as a truly intersubjective enterprise. Speakers have to guess the characteristics 'of their interlocutors' cognitive environments that increase as interaction develops.Context plays an important role in RT, because relevance is a context-dependent notion that is defined in terms of contextual effects and processing effort. The central claim of RT is that human communication crucially creates an expectation of optimal relevance, i.e. an expectation on the part of the hearer that his attempt at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing cost. The key notion here is the choice of context. For all speakers there is an initial context, basically consisting of previous utterances. This context has to be extended in the search for relevant interpretation in the processing of the proposition from the interlocutor's utterance. S&W (1987:702) define propositions as a succession of structured concepts. A concept is a label for different kinds of information: logical, lexical and encyclopedic information. These are the components of the individual's cognitive environment. Usually, hearers extend the context in three main directions: (a) previous utterances; (b)encyclopedic knowledge; (c) adding information to conversational context. Each extension favors the formation of further implications that might (or might not) increase the addressee's processing effort and contributes, eventually to increasing (or decreasing) relevance. The goal of reaching an optimal level of relevance can condition the choice of context. The hearer's goal in comprehension is to find an interpretation that satisfies this expectation of optimal relevance.Communication is highly context-dependent. According to RT, communication is a dynamic ostensive-inferential process. An act of commun...