The Impact Of Cognitive Context Upon Network Chat From A Relevance Perspective

In this thesis, we to present a new approach to the study of a special means of human communication, network chant. This approach is grounded in the appearance and development of cognitive science, which affects a lot on the study of pragmatics. Under this background, this thesis argues that human cognitive process will be fairly helpful and influential in net work chat.The theory of this thesis is mainly based on the Relevance: Communication and Cognition (the second edition) which is co-authored by Sperber and Wilson. In this book, they present a new approach to pragmatics, an approach to communication and utterance understanding based on a general view of cognition. Sperber and Wilson (S&W henceforth) reject the picture of context as monolithic entity that is accessible to interlocutors beforehand during interaction. Instead, they propose a much more dynamic view of context as a construct that has to be established and developed in the course of interaction in order to select the correct interpretation:"a context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer's assumptions about the world,"( S&W, 1986:15). As to the basis of utterance interpretation, S&W propose an alternative notion mutual manifestness to the traditional mutual knowledge in order t avoid its endless recursion of assumptions. People make different representations of their surrounding reality. These representations are called cognitive context in RT's terminology. They are created through the addition of facts that are manifest to the individual. In the course of interaction, speakers are open to a great amount of contextual information and assumptions that are mutually manifest to both, and therefore a mutually manifest cognitive context is created. This gives us a picture of conversation as a truly intersubjective enterprise. Speakers have to guess the characteristics of their interlocutors cognitive contexts that increase as interaction develops.Communication is highly context-dependent. According to RT, communication is a dynamic ostensive-inferential process. An act of communication is successful if it has the communicator's informative intention recognized by the audience, In order to achieve this, the audience has to pursue an interpretation that is optimally relevant to it can get adequate contextual effects without unnecessary processing effort. Given the power of the relevance-theoretical approach to context, the successful communication depends on the hearer's selecting the right assumptions---the ones that yield the intended interpretation.After clarifying the notions of cognitive context, we give an account of the methodology applied in this research. The research questions are: (1) whether there is any influence of cognitive context on network chat; (2) whether the four components of cognitive in Xiong's division affects the interaction of network chat differently and in a certain sequence; (3) whether the cognitive context took part in the interaction dynamically and how it does. We adopt the questionnaire to study these three questions, and give a brief expression about the theoretical and practical significance.Network chat is a special way of communication. It has its own specifics. We hope that we can succeed in capturing the essence of network chat and give a detailed explanation.