A Pragmatic Analysis Of Indirect Answers

In the daily oral communication, it is unavoidable for people to make answers to the questions. The answers can be briefly divided into direct answers and indirect answers. In order to make an investigation into styles of indirect answers in daily conversational exchanges in Chinese culture, this thesis approaches the phenomenon from a pragmatic perspective, drawing heavily on the Relevance Theory (hereinafter shortened as RT) proposed and developed by Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995). It seeks to explain why and how indirect answers vary.This thesis refers to the historical and theoretical background of the study of indirectness, for instance, code model, Grice's theory of conversational implicature, Searle's indirect speech act theory, Leech's and Brown & Levinson's politeness theories. Although these theories are generally applied to indirect styles, there are some inadequacies in these theories, none of them is powerful enough to give an overall account of why and how indirect styles vary in daily communication. Drawing upon the relevance theory, the conceptual framework of the study is formed. Central to the framework is the idea that choices of indirect styles are constrained by the speaker's assumption of relevance. As we have already known, human cognitive processes are geared to achieving the greatest possible cognitive effects for the smallest possibly processing efforts. To achieve this, individuals must focus their attention on what seems to them to be the most relevant information available. Hence, to communicate is to imply that the information communicated is relevant, in the current state of knowledge, Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory is essential to explain indirectness, and it is enough on its own to account for the interaction of linguistic meaning and contextual factors in utterance interpretation.This thesis analyses the qualitative data collected by observation, second-hand data with Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory. Then a detailed qualitative discussion of indirect styles is made, which identifies the adequacy of the conceptual framework. It is found that indirect answers vary along a continuum. The more theamount of contextual information that the hearer is expected to know and the higher the degree of trust the speaker places in the hearer's processing abilities, the more implicit the indirect answer is. It is discovered that variations in the speaker's estimation lead to differences in indirect answers in terms of five dimensions: (1) the specificity of lexical content, (2) the determinacy of the strongest implicature, (3) the degree of misunderstanding, (4) the number of weak implicatures, (5) the strength of socio-psychological effects. The more implicit the indirect answer is, the less specific the lexical content. Consequently, the less determinate the speaker's intended meaning is, the more the weak implicatures, the higher the degree of misunderstanding and the less strong the socio-psychological effect. Actually, the preference of one indirect answer over another is an integrated choice out of the five aspects under the constraint of the speaker's estimation. Hence, The author draws the conclusion that the indirect style, in essence, is a strategy that depends upon the speaker's assumptions in the process of searching for the relevance.This study is quite implicational both practically and theoretically. Practically, this study can enhance our communicative abilities; theoretically, the study will enrich our understanding of indirectness, it also might shed light on the study of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication as well.