Context 英语语用学.pptVIP

Contact me Yanling Tang Foreign Studies College Hunan Normal University 36 Lushan Road, Changsha City, Hunan 410081 The People’s Republic of China(CHINA) Cellphone E-mail: 1596604813@ Context Outline Part 1: Warming up Can you explain the meaning of the words in italics in each of the sentences below? Explain why and then make some alterations in the context so as to pin down the meaning. The police were ordered to stop drinking about midnight. stop people drinking / stop drinking by themselves b. There stood a big stone house at the foot of the hill. a stone house which is big / a house built of big stones c. I have lost Betty’s picture. a picture possessed by Betty / a photograph of Betty d. Visiting aunts can be boring. aunts who are visiting / paying a visit to aunts e. Mr. Webster, the amiable priest, is going to marry Jane at the church. take Jane as his wife / preside over Jane’s wedding Part 2: A general description of context When we think about meaning, it is also important to take into account the contribution of context. In simple terms, then, we can think about pragmatics as the study of the contribution of context to meaning. Here are four sub-areas involved in fleshing out (完善）what we mean by context. physical context Epistemic（关于认知的） context linguistic context social context Physical context: we can think of this in terms of where the conversation is taking place, what objects are present, what actions are occurring, and so forth. Epistemic context: the epistemic context refers to what speakers know about the world. For example, what background knowledge shared by the speakers is crucially part of our epistemic knowledge when we have a conversation with someone else. Linguistic context: the linguistic context refers to what has been said already in the utterance. For example, if I begin a d