The Cognitive Analysis Of Dynamic Context

Context is the most important concept in pragmatic study, and has great significance in deduction of discourse; it plays a vital role in understanding and expression of discourse meaning. Traditional context almost includes all factors: language knowledge, co-text, knowledge of the world, cultural background, communicative situation, etc. Traditional context ignores dynamic study of context; concept of traditional context is too broad and lacks system; systematic contextual study is operated difficultly. Therefore, although people live in the same physical world and have their desires to get information and knowledge from the environment, because difference of specific environments, difference of cognitive capacity among individuals, deducing capacity, memories due to different experience, etc. reflects the individual difference on the world and matter.Sperber & Wilson point out that context is cognitive context of reciprocal understanding in intercourse. They think: " Context is a product of psychology and is one of groups that listeners make the world assumed," and " It is these assumptions, but not practical objective world that restrict people's understanding of discourse." Cognitive context has many features; the most obvious one is its dynamics. Communication of language is a kind of cognitive activity that depends on the principles of thought and regulars; understanding of language is a process of interaction. Cognitive context isn't presupposed, but knowledge that comes to obtain and be stimulated in the process of understanding inference. The construction of cognitive context must, connect with semantic context of language.According to relevance theory, understanding process is a dynamic process, which is the cognitive and inferential process of communicators. During the process, speaker's stimulation of discourse makes cognitive context of minds in listeners active. Speakers can choose the context of the best relevance to help understand, that is that he can temporarily construct a series of contextual assumptions related to the discourse that has the best relevance. Therefore,context depends on the production of communication. With the development of communication, listeners continually emphasize the contextual assumption to get the best relevance related to speakers' purpose by inference.Attitude towards cognitive context studies context dynamically in the view of cognition, which symbolizes the meaningful research transformed from static to dynamic. Cognitive context reveals the foundation and state of cognitive psychology of semantic inference; understanding is a dynamic process of "cognition—inference". This article expressed the features of cognitive context, and analyzes the important role that cognitive context plays in understanding of discourse through specific phenomena of language.With the development of reform of College English, many teachers engaging in college English have explored new approach to classroom teaching to change the situation that theoretical study isn't combined with practical application. The paper explains that cognition and context play an important role in classroom teaching of foreign language, based on the theory of cognition and context. Combining with real situation of teaching of College English, applying cognitive context can change students' attitude to English study, improve interest of students' studying English, finally it can effectively improve teaching quality of College English and perfect appearance of College English.I will discuss context according to following six parts. In Part I, I will simply introduce context, its background and the purpose of the paper. In Part II, studies of context from foreign scholars and domestic linguists are made an overview. In Part III, I analyze contextual dynamics and its features. In Part IV, according to relevance, I attempt to analyze cognitive way of study of context including construction of cognitive context, features of cognitive context, analysis of macro and micro cognitive context, etc. In Part V, I combine cognitive context with foreign language teaching, discuss its role that context, especially cognitive context, plays in foreign language teaching. At last, I will draw a conclusion according to my understanding of context.