论文部分内容阅读
【Abstract】In recent years, the theory of cooperation and conversational implicature, along with the theory of face-work, the principles of politeness and the theory of relevance, has been paid much attention in language teaching. From cognitive angle, all these theories try to explain the application of psychological factors to understand the meaning of a conversation. Teachers can use the reasonable aspects of these theories for reference to explore teaching approaches in practical education.
【Key words】pragmaticscooperative principleconversational implicaturetheory of relevance
【中图分类号】H319【文献标识码】A【文章编号】1001-4128（2011）05-0065-02
1 The definitions of pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of the use of context to make inferences about meaning. It is the study of language comprehension and application. It deals with the way of how to use language tactfully and understand it appropriately. Linguistic correctness alone doesn’t help much in successful interaction. What is more important is appropriateness and tactfulness.
As a relatively new branch of linguistics, pragmatics is undergoing rapid development.Broadly speaking, pragmatics is made up of cross-cultural pragmatics, inter-language pragmatics, societal pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, etc. In recent years，more and more teachers have paid much attention to the close relationship between teaching strategies and pragmatics. With the related theories, we should make exploration in practice in order to make pragmatic theories exert its function. The purpose of pragmatics is to make people use language properly. In this paper, the author puts her eyes on the pragmatic effects on the language in class. In English class, an English teacher conducts his or her students master a language and use it properly, so in this process the teacher should pay more attention to his or her language.
2 The related theories promoting the efficiency of conversational activities in class
2.1 Cooperative principle and conversational implicature:Grice （1975） gives a definition to cooperation principle in the conversation process: Try to make your language appropriate the context in which you take part. To further explain the cooperation principle’s content, he further elaborated some conversational characteristics of cooperation principle. Many scholars treat these characteristics as the cooperation principle, and the cooperation principle includes the four categories: quantity maxim, quality maxim, relevant maxim, and manner maxim. However, in actual conversation, people frequently violate these four maxims. For example:
A: Do you like the pattern of the Datang Paradise？
B: I have not been to Xi’an.
This conversation clearly violates the relevant maxim of cooperation principle, but the two parties can understand each other and also their communication is very smooth. This requires listener that he should infer the hide meaning, i.e. conversational implicature. The process of the conversational implicature is shown in the following conversation
A: How does Bob behave in his class？
B: Oh, quite well. He gets along well with his classmate. His head teacher has not called his parents privately yet.
From this conversation, B’s answer “Oh, quite well.” fits to the question，and B behaves cooperatively. And “He gets along well with his classmates.” almost fits to the conversational orient. But it seems that the last sentence has no relation to the topic and it implies a certain conversational implicature. Meanwhile，because of the different associate relationship between the anticipators, they would adopt different conversational principles. Different conversational principles would affect the content of the conversational implicature and affect if the anticipators can get the correct understanding. In the effective process of conveying the information, Grice’s four maxims have conflicts, such as the conflict between quality maxim and the relevant maxim. However, this conflict does not worse the communicative effect but better it. This conflict is taken as the main regular feature in the communicative process. It makes the speakers have the mind act, that is, to infer something from the conversation, so as to promote the conversational activities. In teaching activities, teachers should balance the communicative activities and the problems of language and social skills in the students’ exchanges.
In the teaching activity, a teacher tries to make every student to take part in the class activities, but because there are many students in a class and there is a big gap between their knowledge structures, the teacher always neglect the requirement of the quality of linguistic communication and concise. However, it does not mean that it is not necessary for teachers to consider if he or she uses language scientifically and reasonably. In many similar in-class teaching activities, many teachers have the similar linguistic problem. They do not consider linguistic quality and the way. At the same time, the Grice language exchange criterion does not need to observe blindly, but it indeed gives the teacher a criticalness method to inspect oneself teaching activity the interactive behavior, the self-examination should be teacher’s daily activity, will inspect with this method, will bring the help for own teaching. Although the theory proposed by Grice has certain conflicts, they provide the way to teachers so that they could self examine their interaction in class. And in this way, teachers could get some benefits.
2.2 Wilson& Sperber’s theory of relevance:S&W’s RT, presented most fully in S&W （1986）, is an approach to communication and utterance understanding based on a general view of cognitional in contrast with formal approaches to pragmatics （e.g. Gazdar 1979） and sociocultural approaches （e.g. Leech 1983）, RT views pragmatic interpretation as a psychological matter involving inferential computations performed over mental representations, governed by a single cognitive principle.
The central claim of RT is that the expectations of relevance raised by an utterance are precise enough, and predictable enough, to guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning. The aim is to explain in cognitively realistic terms what these expectations of relevance amount to, and how they might contribute to an empirically plausible account of comprehension.
Relevance is a potential property not only of utterances and other observable phenomena, but of thoughts, memories and conclusions of inferences. In relevance-theoretic terms, any external stimulus or internal representation which provides an input to cognitive processes may be relevant to an individual at some time. According to RT, utterances raise expectations of relevance not because speakers are expected to obey a Co-operative Principle and maxims or some other specifically communicative convention, but because the search for relevance is a basic feature of human cognition, which communicators may exploit. A speaker must decide what to make explicit and what to make implicit, and this is done on the basis of the speaker’s estimation of the hearer’s processing abilities and contextual resources, but also partly on politeness considerations and what we think of as ‘style’. The more information that the speaker assumes the hearer is able to access in the processing of an utterance, the less explicit the utterance can be.
If instead the target audience was to include people not familiar with this culture, the ad-writer would need to be much more explicit, adding much more lexical information to constrain the interpretation, for example writing ‘Owner-operated （non-commercial） jeep for sale’. When necessary because of the speaker’s estimation of the hearer’s processing abilities and contextual resources, parts of an utterance may be produced solely to assist the hearer in interpreting the main message of the utterance.
There are often a great number of degrees of explicitness possible, depending on the speaker’s estimation of the hearer’s inferential abilities and current knowledge state the more explicit the utterance, the more constrained the interpretation. For example,
A: How long did you finish your project？
B: More than one day.
In this conversation, the answer has the close relevance with the question. The effect of the context is big, so the processing effort of the two parties is few.Another example:
A: I can’t understand this difficult language point.
B: The teacher is still in the teachers’ office.
In this case the relevance is not closer than the above one, but if A makes a few processing effort, A will understand B’s answer, that is, B asks A to go to teachers’ office.
The closer relevance is, the fewer the processing effort is. In the teaching exploration, the RT is not some abstract conception, such as, mutualmanifest assumptions , ostension and so on. RT has value to the processing effort in the conversation and it has the special understandings to acquire linguistic ability through conversation. And the understandings have the instructive meaning to the teaching. If the communicators are good at adjusting their attention, their processing efforts are comparatively few so that they can reach the effective communication. In order to make communicative activities in class meet the best need of RT, teachers should consider the students’ knowledge. Teachers always think that the knowledge they tell is relevant with students’ knowledge, but students think that they must make too many processing efforts to understanding the knowledge. So students get anxious and pressure in their study. This makes teachers realize that the knowledge is “new” to students, they should consider how to teach the knowledge more effective. As we know, teachers explain the new knowledge during the teaching activities, but teachers should know that there will be different occasions among students. So teachers shouldn’t blame some students if they could not easily accept the new knowledge.
3 Conclusion
In linguistics, the implicature and understanding of Cooperative Principle, RT and some other related theories is beyond the traditional ones. They are some abstract conceptions, so it is very hard for a person to understand and accept the conception. However, a person can do it within the certain scope of linguistic communication. This can provide great help to our designing teaching activities, and the theories in utterance have influenced the actual teaching contents. But at present, the theories in the utterance communication have not been truly applied to the language teaching. To understand how to apply these theories to the teaching will greatly promote the language teaching.
Reference
[1] Brumfit, C, & Johnson, K. （eds.）. The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching ［M］. London: Oxford University Press, 1979
[2] Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. Relevance: Communication and Cognition （2nd ed.） ［M］.Oxford England:, Blackwell,1995
[3] 何自然, 冉永平.话语联系语的语用制约性［J］.外语教学与研究,1999（3）.
[4] 刘姬.合作原则及其准则研究中的两个问题［J］.四川外国语学院学报, 2002（5）.
【Key words】pragmaticscooperative principleconversational implicaturetheory of relevance
【中图分类号】H319【文献标识码】A【文章编号】1001-4128（2011）05-0065-02
1 The definitions of pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of the use of context to make inferences about meaning. It is the study of language comprehension and application. It deals with the way of how to use language tactfully and understand it appropriately. Linguistic correctness alone doesn’t help much in successful interaction. What is more important is appropriateness and tactfulness.
As a relatively new branch of linguistics, pragmatics is undergoing rapid development.Broadly speaking, pragmatics is made up of cross-cultural pragmatics, inter-language pragmatics, societal pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, etc. In recent years，more and more teachers have paid much attention to the close relationship between teaching strategies and pragmatics. With the related theories, we should make exploration in practice in order to make pragmatic theories exert its function. The purpose of pragmatics is to make people use language properly. In this paper, the author puts her eyes on the pragmatic effects on the language in class. In English class, an English teacher conducts his or her students master a language and use it properly, so in this process the teacher should pay more attention to his or her language.
2 The related theories promoting the efficiency of conversational activities in class
2.1 Cooperative principle and conversational implicature:Grice （1975） gives a definition to cooperation principle in the conversation process: Try to make your language appropriate the context in which you take part. To further explain the cooperation principle’s content, he further elaborated some conversational characteristics of cooperation principle. Many scholars treat these characteristics as the cooperation principle, and the cooperation principle includes the four categories: quantity maxim, quality maxim, relevant maxim, and manner maxim. However, in actual conversation, people frequently violate these four maxims. For example:
A: Do you like the pattern of the Datang Paradise？
B: I have not been to Xi’an.
This conversation clearly violates the relevant maxim of cooperation principle, but the two parties can understand each other and also their communication is very smooth. This requires listener that he should infer the hide meaning, i.e. conversational implicature. The process of the conversational implicature is shown in the following conversation
A: How does Bob behave in his class？
B: Oh, quite well. He gets along well with his classmate. His head teacher has not called his parents privately yet.
From this conversation, B’s answer “Oh, quite well.” fits to the question，and B behaves cooperatively. And “He gets along well with his classmates.” almost fits to the conversational orient. But it seems that the last sentence has no relation to the topic and it implies a certain conversational implicature. Meanwhile，because of the different associate relationship between the anticipators, they would adopt different conversational principles. Different conversational principles would affect the content of the conversational implicature and affect if the anticipators can get the correct understanding. In the effective process of conveying the information, Grice’s four maxims have conflicts, such as the conflict between quality maxim and the relevant maxim. However, this conflict does not worse the communicative effect but better it. This conflict is taken as the main regular feature in the communicative process. It makes the speakers have the mind act, that is, to infer something from the conversation, so as to promote the conversational activities. In teaching activities, teachers should balance the communicative activities and the problems of language and social skills in the students’ exchanges.
In the teaching activity, a teacher tries to make every student to take part in the class activities, but because there are many students in a class and there is a big gap between their knowledge structures, the teacher always neglect the requirement of the quality of linguistic communication and concise. However, it does not mean that it is not necessary for teachers to consider if he or she uses language scientifically and reasonably. In many similar in-class teaching activities, many teachers have the similar linguistic problem. They do not consider linguistic quality and the way. At the same time, the Grice language exchange criterion does not need to observe blindly, but it indeed gives the teacher a criticalness method to inspect oneself teaching activity the interactive behavior, the self-examination should be teacher’s daily activity, will inspect with this method, will bring the help for own teaching. Although the theory proposed by Grice has certain conflicts, they provide the way to teachers so that they could self examine their interaction in class. And in this way, teachers could get some benefits.
2.2 Wilson& Sperber’s theory of relevance:S&W’s RT, presented most fully in S&W （1986）, is an approach to communication and utterance understanding based on a general view of cognitional in contrast with formal approaches to pragmatics （e.g. Gazdar 1979） and sociocultural approaches （e.g. Leech 1983）, RT views pragmatic interpretation as a psychological matter involving inferential computations performed over mental representations, governed by a single cognitive principle.
The central claim of RT is that the expectations of relevance raised by an utterance are precise enough, and predictable enough, to guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning. The aim is to explain in cognitively realistic terms what these expectations of relevance amount to, and how they might contribute to an empirically plausible account of comprehension.
Relevance is a potential property not only of utterances and other observable phenomena, but of thoughts, memories and conclusions of inferences. In relevance-theoretic terms, any external stimulus or internal representation which provides an input to cognitive processes may be relevant to an individual at some time. According to RT, utterances raise expectations of relevance not because speakers are expected to obey a Co-operative Principle and maxims or some other specifically communicative convention, but because the search for relevance is a basic feature of human cognition, which communicators may exploit. A speaker must decide what to make explicit and what to make implicit, and this is done on the basis of the speaker’s estimation of the hearer’s processing abilities and contextual resources, but also partly on politeness considerations and what we think of as ‘style’. The more information that the speaker assumes the hearer is able to access in the processing of an utterance, the less explicit the utterance can be.
If instead the target audience was to include people not familiar with this culture, the ad-writer would need to be much more explicit, adding much more lexical information to constrain the interpretation, for example writing ‘Owner-operated （non-commercial） jeep for sale’. When necessary because of the speaker’s estimation of the hearer’s processing abilities and contextual resources, parts of an utterance may be produced solely to assist the hearer in interpreting the main message of the utterance.
There are often a great number of degrees of explicitness possible, depending on the speaker’s estimation of the hearer’s inferential abilities and current knowledge state the more explicit the utterance, the more constrained the interpretation. For example,
A: How long did you finish your project？
B: More than one day.
In this conversation, the answer has the close relevance with the question. The effect of the context is big, so the processing effort of the two parties is few.Another example:
A: I can’t understand this difficult language point.
B: The teacher is still in the teachers’ office.
In this case the relevance is not closer than the above one, but if A makes a few processing effort, A will understand B’s answer, that is, B asks A to go to teachers’ office.
The closer relevance is, the fewer the processing effort is. In the teaching exploration, the RT is not some abstract conception, such as, mutualmanifest assumptions , ostension and so on. RT has value to the processing effort in the conversation and it has the special understandings to acquire linguistic ability through conversation. And the understandings have the instructive meaning to the teaching. If the communicators are good at adjusting their attention, their processing efforts are comparatively few so that they can reach the effective communication. In order to make communicative activities in class meet the best need of RT, teachers should consider the students’ knowledge. Teachers always think that the knowledge they tell is relevant with students’ knowledge, but students think that they must make too many processing efforts to understanding the knowledge. So students get anxious and pressure in their study. This makes teachers realize that the knowledge is “new” to students, they should consider how to teach the knowledge more effective. As we know, teachers explain the new knowledge during the teaching activities, but teachers should know that there will be different occasions among students. So teachers shouldn’t blame some students if they could not easily accept the new knowledge.
3 Conclusion
In linguistics, the implicature and understanding of Cooperative Principle, RT and some other related theories is beyond the traditional ones. They are some abstract conceptions, so it is very hard for a person to understand and accept the conception. However, a person can do it within the certain scope of linguistic communication. This can provide great help to our designing teaching activities, and the theories in utterance have influenced the actual teaching contents. But at present, the theories in the utterance communication have not been truly applied to the language teaching. To understand how to apply these theories to the teaching will greatly promote the language teaching.
Reference
[1] Brumfit, C, & Johnson, K. （eds.）. The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching ［M］. London: Oxford University Press, 1979
[2] Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. Relevance: Communication and Cognition （2nd ed.） ［M］.Oxford England:, Blackwell,1995
[3] 何自然, 冉永平.话语联系语的语用制约性［J］.外语教学与研究,1999（3）.
[4] 刘姬.合作原则及其准则研究中的两个问题［J］.四川外国语学院学报, 2002（5）.