A Study Of Pragmatic Failures In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Appropriate understanding of an utterance in a certain context is of great importance in cross-cultural communications, and even in the processing of relevance understanding. Most linguistic comprehension theories have put their focuses on building general principles and maxims of daily communication, except for relevance theory and its derived theories, which have been establishing mathematical comprehension procedures that would describe and prescribe communication in a more precise and extensive way. This thesis mainly adopts relevance theory and inferential formula in an attempt to establish a comprehension procedure that helps explain some situations in cross-cultural communication and further tentatively provides guidance and regulations in relevance-inferential procedure.Corpus is collected from American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, where the micro perspective of cross-cultural communications usually takes place. Corpus mostly features in pragmatic failures in which hearers do not understand what is meant by what is said. Then three situations of pragmatic failures are identified: confusion in cognitive environment, misdirection in dynamic context, and failure to reach optimal relevance. These situations are going through inductive analysis to infer what should be appropriate based on what is inappropriate. In order to make the inductive analysis tenable, a total quantity of211pieces of pragmatic failures are collected, of which a number of typical examples are presented in this thesis.Analysis results show that hearer’s perceiving of an utterance is greatly affected by his/her knowledge background and social understanding. Besides, whether speaker takes into consideration language style to be used in a certain context also takes effect on the understanding of hearer. More objectively, two different speech communities are distinguished based on language styles and character settings of sitcom. The first speech community includes the four male protagonists, who often use formal and frozen language styles; while the second speech community includes female protagonist Penny and other pedestrian characters, who usually use informal and casual language styles.The primary finding of this thesis is that a relevance-comprehension procedure is induced from pragmatic failures of The Big Bang Theory. It takes into account the deciding factors of comprehension in the sitcom, and provides explanations and suggestions for speaker and hearer to engage successful and smooth interaction. Furthermore, a comprehension flow chart, including pieces of formula to estimate language value in computer code are established, which would provide tentative formulation of computerized language processing mechanism for future studies.