Mutual Manifestness And Reading Comprehension

This thesis attempts to study the nature and role of mutual manifestness in discourse interpretation from the cognitive-pragmatic perspective, and to explore the application of "Mutual Manifestness" to the improvement of reading comprehension.Relevance Theory (RT, henceafter) is a kind of theory concerning with utterance interpretation. Its main objects of analysis are the utterances in verbal communication. There is no intrinsic difference between written discourse and any other kinds of verbal communication, because all of them concern about the issue of the speaker/writer's communicative intentions. So RT can also be applied to non-verbal utterance ~ written discourse. Written discourse is still an ostensive communication. In the course of verbal communication, people try to get the biggest profits at the smallest cost. In other words, the communicator always hopes that his utterance is of the greatest relevance while the audience chooses the most relevant contextual assumptions to infer the utterance meaning. Mutual manifestness will occur at three levels, namely, the cognitive environment, the intention, and the context.This thesis analyzes the nature of reading and students' problems first. Then it expounds that mutual manifestness can be classified into mutual manifestness of cognitive environment, mutual manifestness of intention and mutual manifestness of context, also detailed analyses of their respective connotations and roles they play in discourse interpretation are given. The thesis probes into three concrete approaches to apply mutual manifestness to reading comprehension: to enhance the cognitive environment, to improve reading comprehensive skills with the focus on mutual manifest intention and to emphasize the importance of the context.