A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Speech Roles

The theme of this dissertation is derived from pragmatic scholars'criticisms of Relevance Theory. Relevance Theory lays much emphasis on cognitive features of human communication and neglects its social dimensions. This dissertation attempts to supplement Relevance Theory with explanation of social features in verbal communication. This dissertation aims at enriching the relevance theoretic framework in the explanation of communication by introducing notions of speech roles and role assumptions. Through this dissertation, it is suggested that: Relevance can specifically be defined as a set of relations between an utterance and its context. In pursuit of optimal relevance, participants intuitively make certain speech role assumptions available to him and make further choices of contextual correlates in accordance with the principle of relevance: both cognitive and communicative. Speech role means the characteristic of locutionary acts that one is expected to perform in verbal communication with others, or expectations of locutionary acts. It can be thought as a paralleled notion with social role. Speech roles are the performances of social roles in communication. There is a good match between a social role in social interaction and a speech role in verbal communication. In the process of role socialization, a person has been learning to play different roles in social communication with the help of language. As a result, speech roles are internalized in his cognitive system. A cognitive environment is a mental representation of the outside world. It is the result of verbal communication. It is a background full of contextual assumptions. In the cognitive environment, speech role assumptions are one of the basic components and will be in the first place available to activate a subset of relevant assumptions for utterance inference. It merely provides all the possible assumptions for the construction of the cognitive context of an utterance. A cognitive context is a psychological construst. It is temporarily constructed with manifest assumptions from the cognitive environment either by the speaker or by the hearer in the instance of utterance production and comprehension; so it is changing with utterance turns. As soon as communication stops, a series of cognitive contexts ceases to exist. The selection of cognitive contexts is driven by the intuition of search for optimal relevance. Speech roles influence communication through the course of verbal cognition. They are one of the basic components stored in the cognitive environment, and can become manifest in the cognitive context. Speech role assumptions are used as premises that could help to result in appropriate utterance production and comprehension. They raise expectations for more contextual effect and less processing effort and guarantee to achieve optimal relevance of an utterance. Ostension of speech role assumptions and role relations facilitates the achievement of relevance. This ability is represented by the designation and adjustment of speech role assumptions. Designation and adjustment of speech role assumptions serves as paving a path to optimal relevance. The responsibility of failure or misunderstanding in communication lies to a large extent in the less manifestness of speech role assumptions and role relational assumptions rather than lexical decoding. Appropriate designation of speech role assumptions can restrict the extension of context, reduce processing effort, and increase contextual effect. Thus, optimal relevance can possibly be achieved.