Production And Interpretation Of Polite Utterances In Cognitive Context

Politeness, as a social phenomenon, has been one of the most important and productive areas of research in pragmatics. There has been a common viewpoint that politeness cannot combine with cognitive pragmatics. So, ever since Relevance Theory was put forth, there have been a large number of discussions about its social dimensions. Recently, some researchers have employed Relevance Theory to analyze politeness phenomena. Cognitive context, which is a crucial concept in Relevance Theory, has restrictive and interpretive functions mainly. Such functions have been proved by illustrating the production and interpretation of utterances. In this thesis, cognitive context will be employed to explain the production and interpretation of polite utterances to prove that politeness and cognitive pragmatics have an affinity. Thus the applying scope of cognitive context will be extended; on the other hand, another approach to the study of politeness phenomena will be offered.In this thesis, we mainly discuss the following two aspects: (i) The process of producing polite utterances is the process of estimating the hearer's cognitive context and conveying the speaker's intention of being polite. During this process, the speaker's cognitive schema plays an important role in the production of conventionalized polite utterances, (ii) The process of interpreting polite utterances is essentially the process of realizing the intention of being polite. Here politeness is divided into anticipated politeness and inferred politeness from the hearer's perspective, which is based on the previous studies. The process of interpreting anticipated politeness is different from that of interpreting inferred politeness. The former is the process of matching the external stimulus with the hearer's cognitive schema which is the result of his previous experiences, while the latter is more complicated than that of the former. It is the process of constructing a new cognitive context, consisting of pattern recognition, schema activation, knowledge selection and hypothesis formation. That is to say, the hearer will firstly recognize the utterances from the speaker, and then activate his internal cognitive schema which includes a series of propositions by the external stimuli. Next, the hearer will select relevant knowledge according to the principle of relevance. At last the hearer will make a new contextual hypothesis based on the previous phases, and realize the speaker's intention of being polite.