Analyzing Chinese Football Interviews From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

Chinese football players, though always the target of ridicules andabuses, have gradually led a life surrounded by spotlights and enjoyed amore respected career. This trend peaked when Guangzhou Evergrandeclaimed the title of the AFC Champions League, which even generatedenthusiasm in the whole country. However, few linguists have ever paidtheir attention to this field, not to mention explained those discourses in arelevance-theoretic approach.Relevance theory is a great breakthrough in the study of humancommunication. It stresses the importance of searching for relevance andadjusting of cognitive environments for a successful communication.People do not follow some rules when communicating but innately seekfor optimal relevance, which may be assessed in terms of cognitiveeffects and processing efforts.In this paper, I shall first introduce the background of Relevancetheory and some of its basic notions, and then explore its plausibility andusefulness in analyzing Chinese football reports and interviews for thesake of broadening the application of the theory on the one hand, andbetter understanding of those football reports and players’ minds on theother. After detailed analyses, this paper verifies that Relevance theory isvalid and has its unique vantage-point in analyzing Chinese footballinterviews, that Chinese football players tend to speak in a direct way andprovide more information than that is required, and that footballinterviewers should pay attention to the notion of shared cognitiveenvironments, which is crucial to successful interviews.