A Study On Dialogues In Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In our daily life,some of the communicative activities may not go on wheels.According to Relevance Theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson,we can notice that,different utterance and inferential processing of communicative intention from different communicative participants(i.e communicator and audience)usually lead to different communicative results.Communicator's ostensive stimulus,audience's inferential process,contextualization of communicative participant's cognitive assumption and construction of their mutual cognitive environment all can affect the communicative results.Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is one of the Harry Potter series of novels written by J.K.Rowling,these series of novels are stories about Harry Potter,a young magician's school life and adventure story in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.As the third book of these series,this novel's background is still at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,although all the conversation is in magic world instead of real life,as the reflection of real world,its huge amount of character roles,various character relations and fascinating character dialogue,provides idea linguistic data for the study of Relevance Theory.Under the framework of Relevance Theory,based on the character dialogue researches in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,this thesis explores the main character's communicative intentions under different circumstances by analyzing the ostensive process on the part of the communicator,the inferential process on the part of the audience and the construction of new cognitive context between two communicative participants.Most human communication is intentional for some communicative intentions.According to communicative concept and context concept of Relevance Theory,communicative intentions can mainly be achieved by ostensive-inferential process(the ostensive process of speaker and inferential process of hearer),and contextualization(the construction of cognitive environment and update of cognitive assumption).When the speaker wants to fulfil his communicative intention,he produces informative intention(i.e.utterance)as an ostensive stimulus,for the hearer,to arrive at a proper understanding of speaker's communicative intention,he should decode the utterance and refer to his cognitive environment concerning some facts about the informative intention,this is ostensive-inferential process.Context as one of the important notions in Pragmatics,is a dynamic and variable element,contextualization is a continually supplement,correction and optimazing process.Two communicative participants can fulfil contextualization process by constructing a new cognitive environment and updating existing cognitive assumption,in this process,the mutual manifestness of cognitive environment they shared would influence the efficiency of it.Through the study of the dialogue in this novel,the author of this thesis comes to a conclusion that the more closer relationship between communicative participants,the more efficient their ostensive-inferential process is.It is the same case of contextualization,the more communicative participants know about each other,the more mutual manifestness cognitive context they share,the more efficiently they contextualize.The author hopes this thesis will contribute to the development of Relevance Theory and attract more researchers to have further study on communicative concept and contextual concept.