A Study Of Nonverbal Communication In Dream Of Red Mansions From The Perspective Of Elevance Theory

The process of communication is the process of information transferring. As we know,humans communicate and convey messages through diverse means. It could be complementedthrough verbal communication and nonverbal communication. As one focus, nonverbalcommunication has drawn much concern. However, there are few studies on the nonverbalcommunication from the cognitive perspective. French scholar Sperber and British scholarWilson propose the Relevance Theory to explain human communication from the cognitiveperspective, while in their book there are only several examples of nonverbal communicationbeing analyzed.Applying the Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework, this thesis attempts to study onthe nonverbal communication in the famous classic novel A Dream of Red Mansions from thecognitive perspective. By using the method of literature studies, this research collects relativeresources about the studies on nonverbal communication and that in A Dream of Red Mansions.The nonverbal communication is divided into two categories according to the different groups ofthe communicator and the audience. In each category, the instances of the communicationthrough different nonverbal communicative media are picked up from the novel to analyze, inorder to answer the following three questions:1) How is the nonverbal communication in A Dream of Red Mansions achieved?2) What factors affect the extensions of the context when the audience is processing theinformation sent by the nonverbal signals in A Dream of Red Mansions?3) How do the nonverbal communicative media bring about the modification of the contextduring the nonverbal communication in A Dream of Red Mansions?According to the analysis, it is clearly showed that the ostensive-inferential communicationmodel can be well applied in the analysis of the achievement process of nonverbalcommunication in A Dream of Red Mansions. First, there are the ostensive nonverbal factors sentby the communicator to transfer his certain intention. Then, those ostensive stimuli will cause theaudience’s attention and are to be processed in the audience’s cognitive environment. Some oldassumptions in the audience’s cognitive environment will be activated to help the audience toprocess the new information. At last, the audience can infer the intentions of the usage of thosenonverbal factors. The contextual effects appear. There are four kinds of factors that can affectthe extension of the context, including the encyclopedic information of the nonverbal media, thetextual context of A Dream of Red Mansions, the social background of this novel, and thecognitive environment of the readers. Communicative functions of those nonverbal media in A Dream of Red Mansions are classified into five types, including substituting verbal language,reinforcing verbal language, revealing interpersonal relation, showing up identity and socialstatus, and depicting characters.On the one hand, this thesis provides more instances of nonverbal communication for theapplication of Relevance Theory to the study on human beings communication. On the otherhand, this thesis provides an new theoretical approach for the study on the nonverbalcommunication in A Dream of Red Mansions, which can promotes the incorporation of studieson cognitive linguistics and literary. In addition, the systematic analyses of those different kindsof nonverbal communication A Dream of Red Mansions can help the readers have a deeperunderstanding of this novel and promotes the development of Redology.