A Translation Project Report On Default Semantics:Foundations Of A Compositonal Theory Of Acts Of Communication (Chapter 3)

This is a project report on the translation of Chapter 3 extracted from Default Semantics:Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of Communication written by K.M.Jaszczolt,the professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Cambridge.In this chapter,Prof.Jaszczolt formally demonstrates and analyzes the theory of merger representations as the theoretical framework and soul of the whole book.Merger representations are conceived of as abstractions,generations over thought mapping possible world into mental representations.They are more coarse-grained than thoughts in that their information content is only what is relevant for their truth conditions.She also represents cognitive principles of merger representation and emphasizes that default semantics is an auto progress coming forward to the conclusion without conscious efforts.As we all know,semantics and pragmatics are not well-defined for a long time,while in this book Jaszczolt represents creatively a new viewpoint of discourse analysis by merging truth-conditional semantics and truth-conditional pragmatics together to serve default semantics and guarantee the acts of communication,from which we can see that the translation of this chapter is practically significant and theoretically valuable.It offers us reference value to deal with the long-existed difficulties in linguistics and helps to acquire knowledge related to linguistics in a new cognitive way.To conform with the theory of functional equivalence,the author has adopted a great deal of translation methods such as addition,transformation and consolidation,hoping to work out these challenges and difficulties.This translation project offers us an opportunity to gain and learn lessons,namely,every translation is the combined result of theories and practice,which requires the translator’s ability of bilingual translation.The translator must continuously fathom and revise the context according to his or her own experience under the guidance of theories.