Relevance Theory And Its Application Research

Relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson is a new method to pragmatics. It approaches language communication from point view of linguistic philosophy, cognitive science, science of communication and other disciplines. It shifts the whole center of gravity of pragmatic theory to a general theory of cognition. According to relevance theory, language communication is a cognitive process, which must be carried on by inference. Besides, Sperber and Wilson propose relevance principles with great interpretive effects. Relevance theory shifts the key point of pragmatics from utterance production to utterance understanding and points out that language communication is an ostensive-inferential process. At the same tune, relevance theory absorbs some research fruits from modem cognitive science, psychology and behavior science, which makes it own more theory supports than any other communication theory. Therefore, interpretations based on relevance theory is much more convincing. Relevance theory can be widely applied. It can explain various pragmatic phenomena existing in language understanding. First, this thesis gives an introduction to the theoretical backgrounds of relevance theory in order to show this theory has pluralistic backgrounds. The second part of this thesis elaborates the main points of the theory: definition of relevance, relevance principles, laws and models of RT inference, context of relevance theory. Then the thesis deals with interpretive effects of relevance theory. First, it explores its interpretative effects on pragmatic vagueness. Relevance theory can be used to guide the process of identifying the prepositional form of an utterance so as to help people disambiguate and assign reference. At the same time,it also guides people to understand loose talk, such as its metaphorical use (metaphor, irony, humor, etc.). Second, relevance theory has the most powerful explanatory power up to now as regards translation. It probes into the nature and operating mechanism of translation and settles down disputes in the field of translation. All of these are aimed to present a vivid illustration to show the powerful interpretation of relevance theory on various pragmatic phenomena.