On The Subjective Factors Of Contextual Constraints Upon Meaning Expressing And Understanding

As an important aspect of linguistic study, context is an essential concept of pragmatics and has become a major field in pragmatic research. With the growth of semantics and pragmatics and the development of linguistic studies, researches into context seem to be on the increase by a large number of linguists. The importance of context to meaning expressing has become increasingly conspicuous.Context has substantial and sophisticated contents, involving a lot of aspects such as objective factors, subjective factors of the participants, situational factors, and ethnic cultural traditions etc.. All these factors have an effect on language communication. Thus, we have to take these factors into consideration when cognizing and classifying contexts in order to obtain a scientific and comprehensive understanding of the relationship between context and language use.The author of this thesis delves into the studies on the subjective factors in context by different linguists in history, and then advances the idea that the subjective factors of participants in communication play a prominent role in meaning interpretation and they constrain the meaning expressing and understanding. On this basis, the author expounds this argument from the perspectives of the participants' subjective factors like the profession and social status, the gender difference, the cultural and psychological backgrounds, the interpersonal purpose and manner of participants, aiming to delineate the constraints of the subjective factors in context upon meaning expressing and understanding. Readers are expected to construe the fact that the dynamic subjective factors in context have a profound impact on communication. By recognizing this, one is able to obtain the true meaning of words in an appropriate, reasonable and effective way, thus, to achieve a successful communication.This thesis is composed of five sections. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the concept of context, including the definitions of context, main contents of context theories and the organization of the whole dissertation. Chapter 2 is a review of previous studies on the subjective factors in context, domestic and international, both included. In this chapter, the author provides an introduction to the major notions and theoretical patterns of the subjective factors in context put forward by different linguists, which can set a theoretical basis for the following chapters. Studies on the subjective factors in context will be compared in this chapter both from the pragmatic perspective and from the psychological cognitive perspective. Moreover, the connections among various theories involving the subjective factors in context are concerned with achieving a better understanding. Throughout the demonstration, the close relationship between the subjective factors in context and the meaning of language will be shown, foreshadowing the following demonstration in the next chapter. The third chapter deals with the relationship between the subjective factors in context and meaning. In this chapter, the close relationship between the subjective factors in context and the meaning of language comes into view more distinctly. The importance of the role that the subjective factors in context play in meaning expressing and understanding can be better comprehended. In the fourth chapter, the author will narrow down the argument of the thesis by focusing on the constraints of the subjective factors in context upon meaning expressing and understanding. This chapter mainly focuses on these following aspects: the profession and social status of participants; the gender difference between participants; the cultural and psychological background of participants; and the interpersonal purpose and manner of participants. All these aspects tend to be ignored in the past studies on context but are vulnerable to meaning understanding and should be regarded as main points in further study.The last chapter is the conclusion of the thesis. Firstly, the author of the thesis explores the significance of the arguments and makes a summary of the findings. Then the main contributions and limitations of this thesis and speculations about further research are presented.