The Application Of Mental Models In Pragmatic Inference

Conversational implicature often plays a determinative role in the course of communication, besides, it is very complicated, therefore, it has always been the focus of pragmatics research. The aim of this thesis is to study how people understand the right conversational implicature by using the cognitive tool—mental models in pragmatic inference. Concluding others' research of mental model theory, the author proposes his own hypothesis, namely, any discourse is the schema sets which are conveying some information, also called mental models. According to the combination of the selectively perceived information and their own communication goals, listeners and readers build their own mental models by combining long term memory and short term memory alternatively, in order to recover the complete or incomplete mental models which created by speakers or discourse writers. When the two mental models get superposed or inosculated, listeners or readers can understand the real communicative meaning of conversational implicature. In the mental models building process, under some subjective factors influencing, people will build the model falsely or produce different results towards the same affairs.The methodology of this thesis is the combination of the theory comparison with the empirical study. With the former method, the author firstly has a review about the traditional methods which are used to analyze conversational implicature, and summarizes the limitations, meanwhile he points out the limitation as the impetus of developing the new research method. The author introduces the mental model theory and creatively studies five factors which influence mental models building: the inferers' prototype, the numbers of referents in mental models, the way of organization of referents in mental models, the principle of parsimony and the common knowledge between communicators and the inferers' emotion states. With the latter method, the author uses the traditional methods and mental model theory respectively to infer the conversational implicature for comparison, the study testifies that the new method is accurate and advantageous. The method is applied in two daily discourses: advertisements and Chinese Xie Hou Yu which often contain conversational implicature in order to prove the universality and practicability of mental model theory.The application of the new cognitive method is the development as well as the creation for the research system of conversational implicature. People can improve their understanding ability in various daily discourses, reduce their misunderstandings, and communicate better by mastering the correct way of building mental models. Furthermore, it can help and guide the foreign language teaching and learning and conversational implicature generation research.