A Relevance-theoretic Study On Computer-mediated Communication

The birth of the Internet marks a milestone in the development of computer science. The Internet makes the whole world cyberspace. It has been sweeping into people's life, changing people's thoughts, concepts, and even lifestyles unconsciously. All these inevitably have effects on the language. Actually, the language used on the Internet has developed its own style and a particular form of communication comes into being, that is computer-mediated communication (CMC).Nowadays, CMC has aroused linguists'interests home and abroad. However, since CMC has just been studied based on theories and the uncertainty and novelty of net-language, the relevant researches haven't been developed in full scale and generally speaking, the published studies are rather fragmentary than systematic. And the researches are mainly collection and classification of the net-language without much rational reflection. Under such circumstances, it is quite necessary to have a systematic study on CMC and this is also the target of this thesis.Theoretical foundation of this thesis comes from Relevance Theory, a cognitive pragmatics proposed by Sperber and Wilson. According to Relevance Theory, human communication is a certain kind of cognition, which is relevance-oriented. They proposed Ostensive-Inferential Communication Model, which is used as the basic theoretical framework for the present research. This thesis aims to investigate Computer-mediated communication on this framework and offers a new angle of CMC study. It explores how the message sender and receiver make contribution to successful CMC by their mutual efforts through ostension and inference respectively. Undoubtedly, it is a beneficial attempt to study CMC from the cognitive perspective using Relevance Theory and it has aroused people's interest to have a better understanding of CMC from a new angle.