A Cognitive-Adaptive Account Of Chinese Personal References

Personal reference is a process of identifying the participant-roles of the speech act participants (namely the speaker and the addressee) in a speech event by virtue of linguistic signs. The linguistic expressions that fulfill the personal reference function are personal references, most of which are nominal elements. Personal reference discussed in this thesis is quite similar to person deixis in the traditional pragmatics but features in its own way. Most previous studies on person deixis, the fundamental issue in pragmatics, are concerned with its unconventional uses and pragmatic interpretations. These valuable findings, however, don’t do full justice to the whole picture of the personal reference and their accounts of personal reference fall far short of a full explanation, firstly because the traditional classification of personal references proposed by Levinson and other linguists, such as the incomplete and sketchy classification of the first person and second person deixis, neglects some alternatives; secondly because the underlying pragmatic-cognitive mechanism of how people choose the personal references has not yet been properly investigated.Thus this thesis firstly attempts to re-describe Chinese personal references by developing a triple classification of speech act participants in a speech act. Drawing on the notion of "realization" proposed in the syntax-semantic interface research, the thesis identifies three types of realization, namely, absolute realization, redundant realization and deficient realization. This categorization of realization serves as a descriptive model for characterizing the semantic structure of personal references. On the basis of the three types of realization, Chinese Personal References fall into three subcategories:general personal reference, restricted personal reference, and non-autonomous personal reference.Another problem the thesis determines to resolve is to illuminate the factors involved in how the speaker chooses a personal reference in the speech communication. Since human cognition is greatly relevance-driven, it follows that the choice of personal reference in human communication is relevance-oriented. Wilson & Sperber (1986) proposes that relevance is defined in terms of contextual effects and processing effort. The smaller effort needed to achieve the contextual effects, the greater the relevance. With regard to the choice of personal reference in the speech communication, the speaker tends to choose personal references that require least cognitive effort in order to achieve the optimal relevance, thus facilitating the communication. From the relevance analysis of personal references, the general personal references, with the largest degree of relevance, evidently require the least cognitive effort; the restricted personal references take second place; and the non-autonomous personal references indicate the lowest degree of relevance. However, personal references with the largest degree of relevance are not always adopted by people; rather, personal references with lower degree of relevance are actually employed in the real life speech communication. Therefore, relevance plays a role in the choice of personal reference, but this role is not decisive and other factors come into play in the speech communication.It has been suggested the choice of personal references in the speech communication is a result of the communicator’s active adaptation to (physical, social, or mental) contextual correlates based on the necessary relevance to achieve the appropriate pragmatic effects.