An Analysis Of Pragmatic Effects And The Implication Of Can/could-utterances From The Perspective Of Relevance

Relevance is the very necessary condition for understanding of contextual effects. The purpose of human cognition is to seek optimal relevance and to optimize the cognitive environments. In order to guide the hearer to understand the meaning(s) in an utterance and a cognitive direction to absorb the information from an utterance, the speaker usually uses a certain ostensive way (choice of words, or ways of expression, or mood and stresses on words) to help the hearer to get the optimal relevance in utterance understanding. Relevance Theory (RT) is a most effective way which provides a theoretical foundation for the study of linguistic and pragmatic understanding from the perspectives of cognition and communication. This study mainly discusses the pragmatic effects of the implication from an utterance with can or could from the perspective of relevance.This study aims at analyzing the semantic respective and pragmatic effects of the utterances with can or could from the two aspects in RT: ostensive-inferential communication and the principle of relevance. The study mainly discusses the utterances with can or could used by the speaker as an ostensive method in order to emphasize the contextual features and effects, thus to lead the hearer to get a correct and perfect understanding of the utterance. In verbal communication, the speaker intends to provide such ostensive marks of language as can or could and tries to make the hearer find the relevance of the utterance to the speaker's intention. The understanding of and focusing on the utterances with can or could is an inferential process which is used to search for relevance between utterances and contextual assumptions. The hearer usually chooses the explanation with optimal relevance after integrating the literal meaning with the implied cognitive information of the utterance by making use of inferential mechanism, while combining it with contextual assumptions to seek for their intrinsic links. Therefore, the speaker must make some restrictions on the hearer's understanding of the utterance when the speaker generates the utterances with can or could.The study holds that: as an ostensive method of utterance communication, the use of modal verbs is helpful for the hearer to achieve the cognitive effects expected by the speaker for successful communication. The inferential process of the hearer is pragmatically restricted by the logical meaning of the utterances with can or could in different contexts. In another word, understanding utterances is an inferential process between the contextual assumption and new information. The choice, adjustment and confirmation of contextual assumptions are always dominated by relevance. In verbal communication, modal verbs such as can and could are able to help the hearer reconstruct the relevant contextual assumptions so as to get the intention of the speaker. Whereas, the principle of relevance can be used to explain very well that the modal verbs as the ostensive mark can activate and expand the hearer's contextual assumptions to achieve optimal relevance in the understanding of an utterance.