The Construction And Interpretation Of Meaning In Dynamic Context--A Cross-cultural Pragmatic Perspective

Context is the most important concept in pragmatic study, playing a vital role in utterance meaning construction and interpretation. Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory and Verschueren's Adaptation Theory both offer the theoretical basis to understand the dynamic context, but neither of them take a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective. As the economic opened and globalization development, cross-cultural communication becomes more and more frequently, making the research on cross-cultural communicative context particularly outstanding. This thesis based on the above theories on dynamic context, combined with Grice's meaning theory, discusses the relationship between the dynamic system of cross-cultural communicative context and meaning construction and interpretation.The thesis divides context into cultural context, communicative context, and linguistic context; and divides meaning into sentence meaning and utterance meaning. These three kinds of context will interact and have mutual influence. From two perspectives, this thesis analyze the meaning and context: first, from the speaker's perspective, the author analyzes the process of meaning construction in dynamic context, which includes three stages; second, from the hearer's perspective, the author discusses the relationship between dynamic context and meaning interpretation from four aspects: both of them are mutual inference, mutual construction, mutual restriction, mutual adaptation. In cross-cultural communicative context, all relative contextual factors involved in communication will mutually cooperate and adapt under the process of participants achieving their communicative intention. In cross-cultural communication, contextual identity plays a critical role that whether the utterance meaning can achieve appropriate construction and interpretation, however, the cultural identity takes prior condition to contextual identity, whose process the author argued includes six stages: recognizing yourself, making choices, different cultural awareness, negotiation, cultural empathy, and adaptation. Each stage has its own different pragmatic norms and communicative patterns, among the six stages, the communicators should make choice between home culture and host culture, source culture and inter-culture, to make the context achieved the communicators'intention.This thesis hopes to help people make right construction and interpretation on utterance meaning in special communicative context when cross-cultural pragmatic, by expounding the research scope on context and meaning interpretation. We should strengthen the awareness of contextual dynamic characteristic and develop the identity ability on cross-cultural communicative context, to improve the cross-cultural communicative ability.