语用学问答题.ppt

语用学作业 Kristy How do you comment on Searles constructed steps necessary for deriving the non-literal illocutionary force of a statement? 1.These steps are only the possible logical steps of the inference strategies involved in the interpretation of indirect speech acts and may not be the actual steps in people’s rational thinking. 2.The conclusion drawn from these steps is probabilistic, since B’s reply does not necessarily constitute a rejection of the proposal and it is the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that make it so. 3.Non-conversational indirect illocutionary acts may therefore sometimes lead to the incongruence between the speaker’s intended illocutionary force and the hearer’s perceived or understood illocutionary force, due to the lack of linguistic illocutionary force indicating devices. What do you think of the explanatory power of relevance theory? Relevance Theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986,1995) which offers a suitable framework for the treatment of focus. It starts from the proposal that both human cognition and communication are guided by considerations of relevance. Information is relevant when it is capable of yielding large cognitive effects in exchange for small cognitive effort. Cognitive effects are derived when new information is processed in the context of existing information, yielding conclusions that bring about an improvement of one’s representation of the world. Cognitive effort is needed to decode the linguistic content, access contextual assumptions and compute the effects of utterances in the context. The greater the cognitive effects, the more relevant the information will be. Conversely, the greater the cognitive effort to achieve those effects, the less relevant the information will be. The least effort condition of the definition of relevance means that those assumptions which are more accessible are easier to construct or retrieve, so they are mo