Relevance Theory And Context

After reviewing the literature concerning relevance theory, the author found that since Sperber and Wilson introduced relevance theory, few publications have touched upon the comparison between western and eastern culture based on relevance theory. Being very interested in intercultural communication, the author attempts to approach relevance theory from an intercultural perspective.Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory which explores how people communicate. The theory proposes the communication process is ostensive-inferential and reintroduces the coding-decoding process as to be subservient to the inferential one. It sees the intralingual communication as one single ostensive-inferential process. As regards to interlingual communication, translation plays an important role in fulfilling this task. Translation is special as to be involved with interlingual and intercultural communication.The thesis elaborates on the term "context", utilizing the theoretical framework of Edward T. Hall and Hofstede in their works discussing culture, further relating it to culture and communication and then unfolding the relationship among them with abundant examples both in daily conversation and literary works.The author argues that translation is context-dependent, and so is communication both intracultural and intercultural. The conclusion is drawn after a detailed analysis, arguing that context analysis is the effective means which guides intercultural communication, especially in the process of translation, which is one of the ways in intercultural communication. The author further concludes that no universal principle can be applied to complicated process of human communication.The study of pragmatics lays too much emphasis on developing a universal solution to explain human communication, thus contextually varied situations are ignored. By introducing the concept of culture into human communication and having more knowledge in cultural difference in intercultural communication, it would be much easier to explain those phenomena which cannot be figured out in the past.