英语语言学读书报告 英文

Book report of Pragmatics: Theories and Applications

Pragmatics: Theories and Applications was written by Jiang Wangqi who was a famous professor in Pecking University. Professor Jiang has contributed a lot to the development of Functional Linguistics and published more than 30 theses as well as two books in this field. This book is one of his masterpieces. It was published by Pecking University Press in 2000.

There are several reasons pushing me to choose this book. Firstly, pragmatics is an important branch in linguistics and many problems in linguistics can be explained by pragmatics. Secondly, pragmatics pays attention to the regular patterns of language use. That’s what interests me. I want to learn more about these rules and use them to explain utterances in our daily life. Thirdly, conversational implicature is the most essential content in this book. I really desire to learn more about relevance theory and prepare to design a paper based on this theory.

There are seven chapters in this book. Through these chapters, the author introduces pragmatics from different aspects and tells readers the whole content of pragmatics. It isn’t a book just about theories but also about applications which is different from and much better than other books. Then the author explains these content in detail in the following chapters. The first chapter is the introduction of this book which contains an informal definition and the original of pragmatics. The second chapter is about deixis in pragmatics. I am shocked that there are so many deixis in our daily life but we just ignore them. If we want to find something in Linguistics, we must pay more attention to those details in our daily life. The third chapter and the fourth chapter are the essential parts of this book. They are all theories about conversational implicature. They contain the most famous theories in pragmatics and these are what I am going to talk in the latter report. The fifth chapter introduces presupposition. The following chapter is about speech acts. This is also another field that attracts many researchers and learners in pragmatics. The last chapter is about conversation analysis. It pays more attention to application than other chapters and are very close to our daily studies. After reading these chapters in this book, readers can learn a lot of regular patterns in linguistics and grasp more skills to use language correctly.

Among this book, the third and fourth chapters interest me most. Nearly everyone who knows conversational implicature knows the Gricean theory but not the relevance theory. After learning this two chapters, I am more interested in the relevance theory. So in the latter report, I will introduce the relevance theory in detail.

Relevance Theory

In order to explain the conversational implicature clearly, Grice develops his cooperative principle and its four component maxims. Many latter linguists develop their theories based on Grice’s principle but there are also many other linguists against this theory such as Wilson and Sperber. Wilson and Sperber are the founders of relevance theory. Relevance theory is based on a definition of relevance and two principles of relevance which are the cognitive principle and the communicative principle. The central claim of relevance theory 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. In the following part, I will introduce this theory from four different aspects.

1 The development of relevance theory

Recognized the problems in Gricean theory, the French linguist Dan Sperber and British linguist Deirdre Wilson published their thesis in this field named Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986.

After the publication of this thesis, many researchers began to pay attention to this theory. There were many linguists using relevance theory to analyze those problems in pragmatics especially in conversational implicature. Linguists also found some problems of this theory. In order to make their ideas much clearer, Sperber and Wilson published their theses on relevance theory in 1995, 1998, and 2002. Through those theses, they tried to solve those problems that occurred in practice.

With the effort of Sperber and Wilson, more and more linguists recognize relevance theory and use this theory to solve problems in linguistics. In abroad, many popular books and magazines treat relevance theory as a very important part. Lingue had published two monographs on relevance theory. Mey and Asher(1998), Crundy(2000) and Marmaridou(2000) are all based on relevance theory. University