Inference In Relevance Theory And Analysis Of College English Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is an essential skill for communication. And the emergence of the concept of communicative competence marked a shift in the view of foreign language learning from mastery of linguistic forms alone to the acquisition of functional usage of forms in social contexts. In the field of cognitive psychology, the comprehension process is considered interactive, with bottom-up and top-down processing operating in parallel manners. Pragmatic comprehension includes linguistic comprehension, but it also involves sociolinguistic knowledge and context analysis. In other words, the two types of comprehension involve the same linguistic elements, but pragmatic comprehension involves an added dimension, namely context analysis. Both linguistic comprehension ability and pragmatic comprehension ability as important parts of communicative competence, whether there is correlation between them and whether linguistic comprehension and pragmatic comprehension take on developmental tendency are the focus of present study. This thesis applies the relevance theory to the analysis of linguistic comprehension and pragmatic comprehension in listening comprehension. The results indicate that there is no positive correlation between LC and PC except one specific second language acquisition stage in which L2 learners'linguistic knowledge is still in development. Based on the data analysis, we conclude that LC and PC is irrelevant horizontally. However, they have positive correlation vertically when L2 learners'linguistic knowledge is still in development. As two different perspectives in communicative competence, LC and PC need different abilities. It is also proven that inference is a general cognitive operation and relevance theory is full of powerful cognitive force.