A Study On Pragmatic Inference In Utterance Understanding And Its Functions On English Listening Teaching

The aim of listening comprehension is a listener who can actively obtain speaker's intention, especially his/her implicit intention. In the process of listening comprehension, listener searches the optimal relevant information to form a context for inference within limited time, and this process depends on listener's pragmatic inference competence. It is an inferential process, in which the listener uses his encyclopedic, logical and lexical knowledge to process the incoming new information. In other words, the listener searches from his assumptions about the world in his preference and finds the most relevant information to complete inference.Among five skills in college English teaching, listening is regarded as one of the most important skills. The final goal of grasping one language is to communicate, and effective listening comprehension is one of the guarantees in successful communications. Therefore, how to cultivate and improve students'competence of English listening comprehension is becoming one aim for English language teaching, which attracts interest of many researchers and teachers. At present, listening researches can be roughly categorized into four perspectives: psycholinguistic, cognitive, pragmatic and the second language acquisition perspectives. Although these studies, to some extent, give English listening comprehension some enlightenment and improvement, nevertheless, there are few studies conducted from pragmatic inference perspective.The two studying problems of pragmatics are the study on utterance production and on utterance understanding. According to Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory, utterance understanding is a process in which listener searches for relevance to form a context for understanding utterance. Utterance understanding depends on pragmatic inference. Pragmatic inference means that language users use certain knowledge and strategies to infer the relevance between utterance and context, and interpret a mental process produced by contextual implicature. In English teaching, listening comprehension is also a process in which listener infers and searches for optimal relevance in certain context. Thus this thesis attempts to study the effects of pragmatic inference on listening comprehension under the Relevance-theoretic framework.In this thesis, author uses two methods for empirical study, one is tests (English listening comprehension competence test and pragmatic inference competence test), the other is questionnaire. Tests are mainly used for testing the correlation between English listening comprehension competence and pragmatic inference competence,in order to find whether pragmatic inference has effect on English listening comprehension . The findings are (1) Listening comprehension competence and pragmatic inference competence have medium correlation. If students are competent in listening competence, they might be competent in pragmatic inference. But if they can't, they must be less competent in pragmatic inference competence. (2) Students'listening comprehension competence differs from various listening materials, their competences is limited by listening materials, particularly, when they listen to and infer speakers'implicit intentions, their competence is weaker. (3) Pragmatic inference does have effect on listening comprehension. Questionnaire including multiple-choice and open-end questions, is used to investigate students'current situation and problems of pragmatic inference ability that exists in their English listening learning, and to give some implications and suggestions for English listening teaching. From the questionnaire, two findings are: (1) Students know little about pragmatic inference and their teachers pay little attention to introduction and practice of it in listening class. (2) Students have realized the importance of pragmatic inference on listening comprehension, but they still don't know how to use this skill in their listening comprehension. At last, through empirical studies and data analysis, we find there are two functions of pragmatic inference in listening comprehension: external functions (Explaining and restrictive functions), internal functions (Mental mechanism), and these two functions to some extent, can help listening comprehension.Finally, according to the study on relationship between pragmatic inference and listening comprehension, author analyzes the functions of pragmatic inference have in listening comprehension, and gives several suggestions and implications for English listening teaching, in order to improve Chinese students'listening comprehension competence.