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A Rose for Emily is one of the most representative short novels written by William Faulkner in 1930，which immediately aroused interest of readers owing to its suspense and striking conclusion. Since early 1980s China has set off a craze about William Faulkner，this novel as his most popular short story has been researched into by many scholars nationwide who appreciated the novel in different perspectives. Liu Xinmin，Xiao Minghan and Wei Yujie held debate on the theme of the novel，and other scholars have different opinions on the factors causing the heroine Emily’s life tragedy. However，researches into this novel mainly start from the perspective of literary criticism，ignoring analysis to linguistic form.
Relevance Theory（RT）as an influencing pragmatic theory probes into utterance production and interpretation of verbal communication in the perspective of cognition. Literary works interpretation as a mode of language communication is a process of dynamic communication between writers and readers by means of text. Likewise，RT can account for text reading satisfactorily to some extent. Cognitive context as a new term proposed in RT can help to reflect mental states of the addresser and addressee in communication and explain the process of pragmatic inference. Literary works interpretation is also a process of inference to the writer’s communicative intention，so cognitive context is an important cognitive mechanism in affecting text understanding.
My research is in hope of discussing how readers in the framework of RT search for relevance，construct and extend cognitive context in order to achieve contextual effects by analyzing A Rose for Emily，grasping its motif which is just the communicative intention of the writer. In the course of cognitive interpretation towards the novel，my research attempts to explain why Xiao Minghan’s view on the theme of the novel is more acceptable and why Southern Womanhood caused Emily’s life tragedy.
My research adopts methodology for qualitative analysis，extracting representative events from the novel and then from perspective of cognitive context analyzing these events in two aspects: the theme of the novel and cause for Emily’s life tragedy. Following the analysis is the summary about the motif of the whole text. Taking the novel interpretation as an example，my research may shed light on interpretation of other types of literary works. At the same time，my research can be a useful attempt of exploration into Literary Pragmatics，integrating literary criticism and linguistics and delving into cognitive foundation underlying linguistic phenomenon to some extent.