The Study Of Pragmatic Vagueness From The Perspective Of Adaptation-Relevance Theory

Large-scale costume palace drama has recently become a very popular culture carrier.It reflects the ancient life in the real scene,including interpersonal relationship,communication mentality,verbal communication and so on.Scholars study the dialogue of ancient costume drama from different perspectives,some of whom study all kinds of language phenomena in costume dramas from the perspective of semantics,pragmatic,discourse analysis and so on.This thesis aims to study pragmatics vagueness in the ancient costume drama The Legend of Zhen Huan,based on the Adaptation-Relevance Theory.In this thesis the phenomenon of pragmatic vagueness is studied by the analysis of the conversations in The Legend of Zhen Huan,a large-scale costume drama,using descriptive data analysis.The following issues are mainly discussed:(1)characteristics of pragmatic vagueness in The Legend Zhen Huan;(2)the way in which the pragmatic vagueness in the play is adapted to the psychological,social and physical world;(3)the communicative functions of pragmatic vagueness in costume drama.The major findings are as follows:firstly,characteristics of pragmatic vagueness in this costume drama are mainly reflected in the aspects of vocabulary,sentence,communication and context.At lexical level,the speakers tend to use nouns,adjectives or adverbs,hedges and quantifiers.At sentential level,the speakers prefer to tag questions and subjunctive moods.At communicative level,the speakers are likely to use pragmatic multivalence and pragmatic bivalence/plurivalence.At contextual level,speakers make use of their own cognitive context to extend,reduce and change the cognitive assumptions so as to answer speakers’ questions flexibly.Secondly,the use of pragmatic vagueness in the costume drama aims to conform to the communicators’ social world,mental world or physical world;The language communicators adopt the language vagueness in the large-scale ancient costume palace drama to show politeness and maintain the face of the speaker and the communicator so as to achieve the functions of satire,self-preservation,concealment of information or harmonious atmosphere.Since The Legend of Zhen Huan is the representative of the large-scale ancient costume drama,the analysis of the pragmatic vagueness in it has a far-reaching practical significance.Such a study can enrich the research of the ancient costume drama and provide a new perspective for other scholars to study this work.This thesis makes a detailed analysis of the generation and understanding mechanism of pragmatic vagueness in The Legend of Zhen Huan,which is helpful for the public to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the characters,and also serve as certain reference for the use of language in daily life.