Analysis Of Netspeak In The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The 20th century witnessed one of the greatest inventions in the human world, that is, the Internet, and"if the Internet is a revolution, therefore, it is likely to be a linguistic revolution". Netspeak, as the tool and medium for Internet communication, develops rapidly. Broadly speaking, it refers to all the expressions connected with the Internet, including lots of technical terms in computer science. Narrowly speaking, it only represents the popular"language"(including acronyms, homophones, numbers, emoticons, etc.) used by netizens in chatrooms and on BBS. In recent years, many linguists, sociologists and language workers have begun to study Netspeak in its narrow sense from different angles. However, these studies are mainly focusing on the lexical, grammatical, syntactic, rhetorical and sociological perspectives; few have touched upon the pragmatic analysis of Netspeak. Therefore, after discussing about the definition and forms of Netspeak, the thesis tries to make a tentative analysis of the processing and rhetoric features of Netspeak in the perspective of a very important pragmatic theory --- Relevance Theory.The processing of Netspeak is not only coding and encoding, but also a process of ostension and inference. The speaker gives an ostension to convey certain meaning while the hearer infers it and gets to know the real intention of the speaker. In order to have successful communication, both of them must be manifest to the cognitive environment (here of course, is the net environment). However, even in this case, the successful communication is not guaranteed. Because human communication is relevance-oriented, it is the pursuit for optimal relevance that guarantees the success of communication. Optimal relevance is to achieve enough contextual effects by the least processing effort. By seeking optimal relevance, the hearer can easily grasp the meaning of the speaker without making too much effort. Actually this embodies the essence for online communication. Netspeak, being a form of language different from those traditional ones, is a combination of verbal and non-verbal communication. In form, it is typewritten and of course non-verbal. But in contents, the large amounts of colloquial and onomatopoeic usages of expressions make it seemingly verbal. This is where the specialty of Netspeak lies in.The three distinctive rhetoric features of Netspeak, metaphor, pun and fuzzy rhetoric, can also be interpreted by Relevance Theory. Metaphor is a frequently used figure of speech in Netspeak. It is the comparing of things by their similar features. The understanding of metaphor depends on the assumption that the utterance is optimal relevant on the part of the hearer. It requires no special interpretative abilities or procedures: it is a natural outcome of some very general abilities and procedures used in verbal communication. Similar to metaphor, pun also makes use of the connection between things. Cognitive context plays a decisive role in using pun. In different contexts, the same word or expression may be interpreted differently. This special function of pun enables people to deliberately express a different intention from the literal meaning by using the same utterance. Fuzzy rhetoric is a problem of explicature and implicature. Many netizens tend to use ambiguous words rather than explicit expressions. Therefore, the hearers must use their own cognitive knowledge to infer the meanings implied in the utterances. However, the ambiguous usage doesn't always hinder the communication; on the contrary, it is for the purpose of achieving certain effects in most cases. All in all, relevance is the soul of interpersonal communication and the application of these three figures of speech must obey the relevance principle. Through these analyses, the strong power of Relevance Theory to interpret natural language is further proved.