Cognitive Context's Role In Discourse Production And Interpretation

Pragmatic communication is a two-way activity. It involves the one who expressesinformation and the other one who receives. In the specific linguistic communication, contextis a necessary factor during the whole process. It influences the production and interpretation of the discourse. Relevance Theory analyzes the pragmatic phenomena from cognitiveperspective and puts forward the definition of cognitive context that is different from thetraditional view on context. In the process of communication, the contextual factors are not static but dynamic. In order to communicate successfully, cognitive context will influence andrestrain the language users in their production and interpretation of the discourse. This thesisaims at analyzing cognitive context's role in the discourse production and interpretation. This thesis contains five chapters. The first chapter mentions the differences between thetraditional view on context and cognitive context and points out their functions in theproduction and interpretation of discourse briefly. Chapter two discusses the history of the research on context and the notion of text,discourse and utterance. Chapter three analyzes the role cognitive context plays in the production of discourse. Chapter four focuses on how cognitive context influences the understanding of discourse. The conclusion has a summary of this thesis, and points out that cognitive context is avaluable notion in pragmatic research though there are limitations and problems that remainto be solved.