On The Roles Of Cognitive Context In Successful Verbal Communication

Context is an important concept in pragmatics. It is also a very complicated concept, on which lots of the scholars both at home and abroad have already made some great achievements, especially with the proposal of cognitive context put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, which is greatly different from the traditional study of context. The traditional study of context emphasizes the functions of the external world in communication from the static perspective but neglects the mental activity of human beings and the dynamic nature of communication, such as Malinowski's situational context and Halliday's register theory. However, cognitive context lays stress on the analysis of the psychological state of the communicators and the process of cognition from the dynamic perspective. It provides persuasive explanation of the essence of context. Verbal communication is not only a complicated social phenomenon but also a common social activity. It is greatly context-dependent. As verbal communication is dynamic, context in it is not an objective, static and fixed entity but a constantly selected variate with the need of communication and a constantly developed dynamic system in the on-going process of communication. Therefore, the proposal of cognitive context is of great significance to the study of verbal communication.Based on the relevance theory, this thesis firstly makes a comprehensive illustration of the definition of relevance, degrees of relevance, the principles of relevance and the ostensive-inferential model of communication. Then after a careful introduction to the context study and a comparison with the traditional context, this thesis holds the same view as that of the coauthors and the domestic scholar, He Ziran on cognitive context: cognitive context is regarded as a psycological construct, a set of assumptions stored in people's mind to interpret utterance correctly in the process of interaction. Cognitive context is a set of people's assumptions about all the facts or hypotheses which can be perceived and inferred. It is a psychological construct, which usually consists of lexical information, encyclopaedic information and logical information. This kind of cognitive context has three basic features: gestalt, humanistic and dynamic.Finally, with a combination of the previous researches on verbal communication, the thesis makes a trial explanation of the redefinition of successful verbal communication. We hold that successful verbal communication is a highly context-dependent ostensive-inferential communication, in which the communicators' primary communicative intention is achieved or nearly achieved on the condition of mutual manifestness and the optimal relevance. And success is not an absolute concept, but a relative one. In the framework of this definition, the thesis mainly discusses the roles of the speaker's and the hearer's cognitive context in successful verbal communication by analysing some typical daily utterances and conversations. From the speaker's angle, cognitive context can help the speaker present the utterance in an appropriate way to enhance his/her action of ostension and enlarge the contextual effects in the process of interaction so as to achieve his/her communicative goal; from the hearer's angle, cognitive context can help him/her effectively interpret what the speaker expressed to enhance his/her inference to gain the contextual effects so as to achieve successful verbal communication.This exploration gives us some implications for English speaking teaching. In the course of speaking teaching, both of the teacher and the students need to constantly select and construct their cognitive context to achieve the communicative goal. And the teacher should lay more stress on the cultrual background entry and create authenticity in teaching English speaking.