A Relevance-theoretical Approach To The Generation Of Dynamic Context

Context is highly essential for information transmission, logical inference, utterance explanation and pragmatic competence development. The study of context has developed rapidly during the recent years and it has become the focus of pragmatic research. In recent studies, scholars lay more emphases on the cognitive aspects of context, believing that it is a psychological construct, a sub set of the hearer's assumptions about the world rather than a static notion. All through the ages, scholars hold different opinions on the research of context. The study of this concept has mainly undergone two stages: static study and dynamic study.Traditional view believes that context is the combination of the elements taken out from the concrete situation and it is these elements that influence both the communicating process and communicators. The characteristic feature of static context is: it exists in advance of communication comprehension, through which communicators define meanings of utterances. The basis of inference under the framework of traditional view is mutual knowledge. But as the study of context goes deeper and deeper, more and more linguists have found that both the communication process and the generation of context are dynamic and on-going processes. So it seems that the traditional idea is helpless to explain the dynamic property of communication.Since 1980s, cognitive science entered into the field of pragmatics and hence cognitive pragmatics was born. Cognitive pragmatics focuses on utterance interpretation and cognitive context. In 1986, Sperber & Wilson put forward the relevance theory which successfully explained the communication process and context from the cognitive aspect. It regards context as a dynamic and on-going concept, believing that it is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer's assumptions about the world. Relevance theory believes that utterance interpretation is, as a matter of fact, an inference process going back and forth between context assumptions and the newly input information. The whole process is controlled by the principle of relevance.This thesis tries to explain how to control the generation of dynamic context during the complicated communication process based on the relevance theory so as to explain the dynamic process of communication and finally with the study of context, improve college students' pragmatic competence.