Wilson and Sperber--Relevance Theory(17)

英语专业毕业论文参考资料,关联理论的外国文献,用于题目为语用学只用

260 Deirdre Wilson & Dan Sperber

(9)

Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure a. Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects: Test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility. b. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.

Given clause (b) of the definition of optimal relevance in (8), it is reasonable for the hearer to follow a path of least effort because the speaker is expected (within the limits of her abilities and preferences) to make her utterance as easy as possible to understand. Since relevance varies inversely with effort, the very fact that an interpretation is easily accessible gives it an initial degree of plausibility. It is also reasonable for the hearer to stop at the first interpretation that satisfies his expectations of relevance, because there should never be more than one. A speaker who wants her utterance to be as easy as possible to understand should formulate it (within the limits of her abilities and preferences) so that the first interpretation to satisfy the hearer’s expectation of relevance is the one she intended to convey.13 An utterance with two apparently satisfactory competing interpretations would cause the hearer the unnecessary extra effort of choosing between them, and the resulting interpretation (if there were one) would not satisfy clause (b) of the definition of optimal relevance.14 Thus, when a hearer following the path of least effort arrives at an interpretation that satisfies his expectations of relevance, in the absence of contrary evidence, this is the most plausible hypothesis about the speaker’s meaning. Since comprehension is a non-demonstrative inference process, this hypothesis may well be false; but it is the best a rational hearer can do.

Notice, incidentally, that the hearer’s expectations of relevance may be readjusted in the course of comprehension. For example, it may turn out that the effort of finding any interpretation at all would be too great: as a result, the hearer would disbelieve the presumption of relevance and terminate the process, with his now null expectations of relevance trivially satisfied.

It is sometimes suggested (e.g. by Morgan and Green 1987: 726-7) that puns and deliberate equivocations present a problem for this approach. We would analyse these as cases of layering in communication, a widespread phenomenon which fits straightforwardly with our account. Just as the failure to provide relevant information at one level may be used as an ostensive stimulus at another, so the production of an utterance which is apparently uninterpretable at one level may be used as an ostensive stimulus at another (see Sperber & Wilson 1987b: 751, Tanaka 1992). 1413

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