Explanatory Force Of Adaptation-Relevance Model In Teacher Talk

Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) postulated the relevance theory, which hold that communication is an ostensive-inferential process. It has been applied in various linguistic aspects. It claims that human's cognition is relevance oriented and thus verbal communication is to seek optimal relevance. With its overwhelming theoretical explaining power, it is mainly concerned with the theoretical explanation of utterance interpretation, but inadequate in describing the detailed regularity of language. It fails to prove the contextual correlates and some other related problems.Verschueren (1999:7) claims that communication is an adaptation process and pragmatics is a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavior. Therefore, using language consists in the continuous making of linguistic choices in terms of variability, negotiability and adaptability. It provides an original and systematic outline of the theoretical basis of pragmatics, covering the whole range of social, cultural and cognitive aspects involved in constructing meaning through language use. While the theoretical explanatory force of adaptation theory is weaker than that of relevance theory.On the basis of the two theories, Yang Ping proposed a new model of communication from the speaker's point of view. This model achieves adequacy in terms of description and explanation which the relevance theory and the adaptation theory fall short of. However, it is not comprehensive for a communicative model for it just focuses on the utterance production. Therefore, based on this framework, Ran Yongping (2004) made further efforts and presented a more comprehensive adaptation - relevance model which concerns both the utterance production and interpretation. According to adaptation - relevance model the process of language use is to achieve adaptation and relevance, that is, the linguistic choice and application is the process to seek optimal relevance while adapting to the relevant context.Teacher talk is viewed as one of the decisive factors of success and failure in SLA classrooms, which has attracted great attention of the scholars in recent years. However, most of the studies focus on the formal features of teacher talk but pay less attention to the functional features of it. Based on the basic principles of adaptation-relevance model, the author tries to makes use of this newly proposed Adaptation-relevance model to explain and describe the process and nature of teacher-students interaction talk in form of question-answer mode in L2 classrooms from three perspectives: the dynamic notion of context; the inter-adaptation between linguistic behavior and the contextual correlates; the dynamic production of meaning. And it proves that the analysis of the teacher-students interaction talk serves as the convincing support for the explanatory force of Adaptation-Relevance model in teacher talk. Additionally, on the base of analysis of applications of this model in teacher talk the author puts forward some strategies on successful teacher-students interaction and some suggestions on language teaching.