A Tentative Interpretation Of A Communication Model From Sociocultural & Cognitive Perspectives

As a newly arising discipline, Pragmatics has achieved a rapid development since the 1960s. In 1959, Rudolf Carnap explained that pragmatics referred to the relationships between signs and their users. Since then, pragmatics has been developed with enthusiasm. It entered an especially meaningful phase when J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words got published. During half a century, pragmatics, as an independent discipline, has experienced an astonishingly rapid development and has become a well-investigated and thoroughly-researched area in the linguistic circle with the proposals of various pragmatic approaches and perspectives.So far as approaches to pragmatics are concerned, there are mainly two ways of doing pragmatics, one being descriptive and the other being prescriptive. These two approaches cover pure pragmatics, descriptive pragmatics and applied pragmatics. With regards to pragmatic perspectives, there are three perspectives: metapragmatics, macropragmatics and micropragmatics. Metapragmatics is the study of the object language of pragmatics itself. Micropragmatics and macropragmatics are two different interpretations of pragmatics, with the former being a perspective towards pragmatics which is generally held by the Anglo-American School and the latter being a perspective which is generally held by the Continental School. Micropragmatics centers primarily on such topics as deixis and presupposition, while macropragmatics mainly deals with such subjects as cognitive pragmatics and sociocultural pragmatics.The topics researched by the Anglo-American School, who treats pragmatics as another branch of linguistics, belong to micropragmatics. The topics researched by the Continental School, who regards pragmatics both as a perspective on linguistics and as an interdisciplinary subject, are the focus of macropragmatics. Verschueren, in his work Understanding Pragmatics proposed that pragmatics is a perspective on linguistics. And more than that, he made the proposal of Theory of Adaptation in order to obtain a new understanding and interpretation of pragmaticsThe study of micropragmatics can not be independent from concrete socioculturalelements, factors and backgrounds, neither can macropragmatics. It also needs a good understanding of the common and universal knowledge about human beings, like human cognitive science. It is the author's opinion that, in doing pragmatics, sociocultural pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics should be integrated in order to establish a more comprehensive perspective on pragmatics.Though conversational implicature is a newly developed conception in pragmatics, the inference of conversational implicature is by no means new. The code model and the inferential model are the framework of the ostensive-inferential model proposed by Sperber & Wilson in their Relevancy Theory. This model opened a new insight into the understanding of utterance meanings in human verbal communication. Nevertheless, their model is mainly explained from the internal or cognitive aspect of the participants. So far as the external or sociocultural aspect of understanding utterances is concerned, much room is still left for further discussion or exploration. It is the author's opinion that an integrated model which takes both sociocultural and cognitive aspects into consideration might seem to be more reasonable for us to infer conversational implicature.