An Analysis Of Contextual Adaptation In Written Discourse Construction

Language is an important tool in human communication, and communication throughdiscourse, a form of language, is an important part in human life. However, discoursecommunication has to be conducted within specific contexts; that is to say, communicationcan hardly achieve success when isolated from context. Naturally, context becomes one of themost important concepts in the study of linguistics. Lots of Chinese and foreign linguists fromdifferent fields, such as sociolinguists and anthropologic linguists, have been studying contextin different approaches from different perspectives, but most of them focused on either thedefinitions or the relationship between discourse and context, and great consideration wasgiven to their mutual predictability, while little attention was paid to how written discoursesadapt to their contexts.Discourse can be divided into spoken discourse and written discourse. This thesisanalyzes the context of written discourse within the framework of Jef Verschueren’sLinguistic Adaptation Theory. Jef Verschueren, a Belgian linguist, put forward his pragmaticperspective of language in1999, with its emphasis on adaptation theory. He holds the viewthat language use is a continuous process of choice-making, and language has threecharacteristics: variability, negotiability and adaptability. In constructing a written discourse,the writer employs many strategies to make his/her linguistic choices adaptable to the context,so that effective communication with readers can be achieved.The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is introduction, describing thesignificance of the research and main structure of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review,introducing discourse analysis and context respectively, and particularly describingVerschueren’s interpretation and classification of context. Chapter three elaboratesVerschueren’s Adaptation Theory (AT), introducing three properties of language andproviding four angles of investigation from pragmatic perspective. Contextual AdaptationTheory, as the core part of AT, is also included in this chapter. Chapter four makes an analysison contextual adaptation in written discourse construction. Based on the analysis of plenty ofwritten discourses, the thesis finds that the construction of written discourse is a process ofmaking dynamic linguistic choices so as to adapt to linguistic context and communicativecontext to different degrees and believes that contextual adaptation plays an important role inthe process of constructing written discourse. The last chapter is conclusion, which concludesthe main implications of the paper, and points out some limitations as well. To sum up, the adaptation theory casts new insight into the construction of writtendiscourse, and sheds light on the pragmatic strategies that contribute to those successfulwritten discourses. The author hopes to elicit some helpful suggestions for constructingEnglish written discourse through this thesis.