The semantics of Adj+Noun combinations: A new hybrid model of cognitive semantics
南京国际关系学院《外语研究》编辑部 张  辉 (Zhang Hui)

The form of the adjective-noun combinations is very simple，nothing but the array of an adjective and a noun. However, according to the different nouns or noun classes it modifies, the adjective will take on different meanings, so will the combinations. The traditional explorations all take the principle of compositionality as the premise for research. As we all know, anything that deserves to be called a language must contain meaningful expressions built up from other meaningful expressions. How are their complexity and meaning related? The traditional view is that the relationship is fairly tight: the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituents—once we fix what the parts mean and how they are put together we have no more leeway regarding the meaning of the whole. This is the principle of compositionality, a fundamental presupposition of most contemporary work in semantics. If we regard language competence as an infinitude resource, this principle is useful. But that means we just limit the meaning of the expressions to the expressions themselves without taking the environments in which they appear into consideration. Therefore, under the principle of compositionality, we can not explore the meaning of combinations in a full-scale way, especially the meaning of those adjective-noun combinations highly sensitive to the environment in which they appear. In this paper, we will try hard, mainly from the perspective of cognitive semantics, to explore the complex meanings hidden behind all kinds of adjective-noun combinations and propose a framework of lexical meaning, and we will use the theory of Conceptual Integration (CI) in cognitive semantics associated with the notion of Qualia Structure in generative lexicon as our new analytic tools.

Application of metaphor in Japanese tanka and its pragmatics and cognition
广东外语外贸大学 张继文 (Zhang Jiwen)

As one of great treasures of Japanese culture, tanka, a literary form, has been demonstrating its prosperous vitality since its naissance. In the process of origination, metaphor is widely applied as a technique of expression. Metaphor is not only a kind of rhetoric means, but also a method of cognizing things from a new perspective. By analyzing the expression of semantic structure of metaphor in the tanka and applying pragmatics and cognition as well as the related theory to understand and analyze the metaphors and imageries from the aspects of association, reasoning, context and cultural background, a colorful world is presented before us through tankas.

Meaning construction: Towards an intentional cccount
郑州大学外语学院 张巨文 (Zhang Juwen)

Intentionality is the property of human mind which is directed to or about the physical world. It is typically human-specific (it is more adequate to say that intentionality is a property the animated have, for other kinds of higher animals are also believed to be intentional in their own ways), and is both psychological and social. From the communicational point of view, human beings interact in order to convey thoughts, express feelings or perform actions. On this account, constructing intended meanings in context is what makes up the focal concern in any piece of communication. This article claims that intentionality is, fundamentally, a psychological and sociological symbiont which occurs as human beings relate to the physical world, and meaning construction is a conceptual representation of that relation which is coded in a given language. Intentionality expresses how human mind is related to the world, while meaning construction reflects in what way human beings use language in context. In the communication process, meaning construction is intentionally oriented for the purpose of satisfying the specifically defined communicative intentions.

Implementing pragmatics-oriented discourse analysis in intensive class
河北工程大学文学院 张  俊 (Zhang Jun) 牛贵霞 (Niu Guixia)

The paper first introduces the status quo of intensive reading class with respect to the recent years’ master-degree dissertations (Hu Yuanjin, 2005; Tao Xinhui, 2006) and the investigations by interviewing college English teachers from different universities. The facts generalized in the paper indicates that teachers, in most cases, have forgotten their duty to foster the learners’ pragmatic awareness in intensive class, making little discourse analysis, let alone taking pragmatic approaches. The conditions can not meet the demands promoted by the new College English Curricular Specification published by the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2004, which encourages college English teachers to develop the learners’ ability of using English to communicate.
Secondly, the authors explore the main tasks an intensive class should undertake. They points out that it is necessary the readers should make communication with the author and make clear the author’s real meanings while reading his/her article, rather than just do lexical explanations and syntactic analysis, for texts have their meta-functions, such as ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function (Halliday, 1994). Based on this, the author emphasizes the realizing of interaction of two processing patterns – “bottom-up processing” and “top-down processing” (Carrel, 2000), insisting discourse/text analysis be taken in light of pragmatics.
Next, the paper briefly gives account of the current tendency of interaction of pragmatics and discourse analysis and strongly recommends Gee’s theory and method of discourse analysis. The two disciplines are mingling with and beneficial to each other, from which second language acquisition can get interests as well, the author holds the view. Gee’s theory is a theory for studying how the details of language get recruited, “on site,” to “pull off” specific social activities and social identities (Gee, 1999: 1). Gee’s method (Gee, 1999: 96) is generalized in a manipulative frame in the paper. First pick some key words and phrases in the data, or related families of them, and ask what situated meaning they seem to have; secondly, think about the cultural models these situated meanings appear to implicate, together with the relevant social languages and discourses; thirdly, organize your analysis so that the material you have developed speaks to, argues for, and illuminates the final main points, themes, or issues chosen to address in your paper; to extend your analysis to other parts of your data or new sources of related data (or to data in the literature) to begin to achieve some degree of validity in regard to coverage, and/or to use citations from related literature, and collaboration with others to begin to achieve some degree of validity in regard to agreement.
Finally, the paper sets up an application model of implementing pragmatics-oriented discourse analysis in intensive class. All the data used in the analysis are picked up from the passage Face to Face with Guns from New Horizon College English (Zheng Shutang, 2001: 148-50). By this model, the author illustrates ways to combine knowledge and principles of pragmatics and discourse analysis in order to find the implications of the language items and the real meaning of the author of the passage. The paper calls on fostering the learners’ pragmatic awareness in intensive reading class, which will help develop their ability of using target language.

A pragma-cognitive account of spatial relations
河南大学  张克定（Zhang Keding）

From the pragmatic point of view, two entities involving the sane spatial relation perform different pragmatic functions. The entity that serves as the reference point is generally definite and given, while the other entity is often indefinite and unknown. The latter may be used to convey new information by foregrounding against the former.

Measuring the salience of speaker intention in “warning” in textual interaction: A social linguistic approach
南京理工大学外语系 张丽萍 (Zhang Liping)

As the indication of speaker intention gains a pivotal role in theorizing human communication in general, so the salience of it remains a mysterious issue in pragmatics. Much diversified approaches, be it logical or cognitive, have been tried, the stigma of empiricism is lingering on in pragmatic research largely because most issues in the field of pragmatics have been reduced to tangible matters, mainly dependent on the intuitive knowledge of researchers. To probe for a way of making pragmatics a hard science, formalized or experimental efforts are desirable and urgent. This paper is meant to tentatively measure the salience of speaker intention in textual interaction. Since the manifestation of speaker intention takes up a practically important role in product liability case, where the written warnings in product manuals symbolize the substantive interaction between manufacturers and consumers in the textual level, this paper attempts to take the cigarette package warning as a sample, trying to explore whether the salience of speaker intention, warning, is ranked in accordance with the change in language form (for instance, syntax).     

A socio-pragmatic study of co-relevancy between the author’s intention and the reader’s decoding of general interrogative titles
南京理工大学   张权 (Zhang Quan)  李娟 (Li Juan)

The title of an article is generally fixed on confirmative phrases or sentences, for which its author is going to provide supporting evidence. A general interrogative title, in contrast, is to raise a question which its author him/herself is supposed to give a positive, negative or partially positive and partially negative answer in his/her article. The interest of this paper lies in two questions: (1) what would be the reaction of the reader upon just reading the interrogative title without reading the whole article? (2) How is this reaction co-relevant with the author’s intention, that is, the answer by the author him/herself in the following article? From the perspective of socio-pragmatics, the authors of this paper have randomly collected 100 general interrogative titles from some Chinese magazines or newspapers that are most popular to college students and then designed a questionnaire, in which 100 subjects, who were randomly chosen, are asked to choose one of the three possible answers(positive, negative, partially positive and partially negative) to the question “which do you believe would be the key to the general interrogative title you have read without reading the whole article?”. A data-based comparative study is then made to establish the possible correspondence between the author’s intention and the reader’s decoding of the general interrogative titles. A pragmatic or cognitive analysis is finally given for possible explanations of this co-relevancy.

A pragmatic interpretation of lexical clone construction
上海外国语大学 张  韧 (Zhang Ren)

The lexical clone construction, also termed double construction or contrastive focus reduplication, is a very common phenomenon in colloquial American English. A wide range of lexical items can be reduplicated to focus the denotation on a more sharply delimited, more specialized range: for example, a DOCTOR doctor can be used to denote people who have a M. D., not a Ph. D. in linguistics. This paper sets out to account for the formation mechanism, interpretation process, and pragmatic features of lexical clone constructions in English and also analyze those linguistic devices with similar functions in Chinese.
Lexical clone construction mainly arises out of the speaker’s need to clarify and specify the meaning of certain lexical items in utterances, given the fact that most lexical items are usually ambiguous and fuzzy in meaning. Why employing the lexical clone construction (that is, using XX) instead of spelling out the specific meaning overtly (e.g., using YX) or giving no hint at all in the utterance to inform the hearer that a specific meaning is intended (that is, using X)? It can be explained by resorting to the interplay between Horn’s Q principle (also known as Auditor’s Economy) and R principle (also known as Speaker’s Economy).
The interpretation process of utterances containing typical lexical clone constructions can be analyzed by employing the principles and procedures proposed by Relevance Theory. The lexical clone construction is used to communicate an ad hoc concept which contributes to the explicature of the utterance in which it occurs. And a number of implicatures are derived on the basis of explicature and contextual assumptions. All the inferential processes are guided by the expectation of relevance.
Three pragmatic features of lexical clone constructions are then pointed out: (1) The prototypical meaning conveyed by lexical clone construction is closely related to the cultural background knowledge; (2) When the lexical item cloned has no obvious prototypical meaning, the specific meaning conveyed or the subset singled out by lexical clone construction is to a great extent decided by the context and the speaker’s intention; (3) In addition to conveying the prototypical or specific meaning, the use of lexical clone constructions universally implicates that the lexical items being cloned may have other possible interpretations when used in a different context.
Although lexical clone construction is unique to English, linguistic devices with similar pragmatic functions can be identified in Chinese: (1) The use of the character “真” in front of certain nouns to pick out the prototype category member (e.g. 真金，真功夫); (2) The use of the character “正” in front of certain nouns to indicate the core category member (e.g. 正午，正门); (3) The use of “真” in front of many adjectives to intensify the meaning (e.g. 真快，真难看); (4) Certain adjectives can be cloned in a syllable-by-syllable fashion to intensify their meaning (e.g. 干干净净，漂漂亮亮). It should be noted that the above linguistic devices are relatively limited in Chinese as compared with the wide range of lexical clone constructions in oral English.

Issues and debates in post- or after- Gricean pragmatics
东北师范大学  张绍杰 (Zhang Shaojie)

In modern pragmatics there have appeared three major theories such as speech act theory, conversational implicature theory and relevance theory. It is often the case that the relevance-based pragmatic theory that arose after Gricean pragmatics is called post-pragmatics, but I generally call what have arisen after Gricean pragmatics post- or after- Gricean pragmatics.
In recent years post- or after- Gricean pragmatics has attracted a lot of attention and there have been an increase of interest in those theoretical issues that have been brought about in the field of study. Various points of view can roughly fall into two big categories: semantic minimalism and pragmatic contextualism, with the latter being further divided into radical contextualism and moderate one. Then what exactly has happened, what has caused these issues, and over what in post- or after- Gricean pragmatics? The presentation is intended to answer these questions by focusing on implicature inference models, interface between semantics and pragmatics, and the role of convention in implicature understanding.

Intentionality and metapragmatic awareness: A new perspective of interpreting The Mayor of Casterbridge
华南师范大学外文学院 张淑玲 (Zhang Shuling)

Thomas Hardy himself classified most of his novels into a group named Novels of Character and Environment, in which The Mayor of Casterbridge is important one. It gives an account of the tragic life of the hero, Henchard who rises from a hay-trusser to mayor of the town Casterbridge but becomes hay-trusser again after bankruptcy and being isolated by friends and relatives and in the end dies in a solitary hut. The tragic novel aroused great interest of quite a lot of scholars who showed sympathy for the hero and tried to dig out the root of his tragedy. Thus there appeared different interpretations of this literary work, among which the one from description of Nature is often agreed by some researchers who believe that the conflict between man’s aspirations and his environment is the central unifying force of Hardy`s tragic novels. This article attempts to offer a new perspective of interpreting the novel from intentionality and metapragmatic awareness.
Unlike face-to-face communication, literary communication is a kind of communication between a writer and his audience in special context. In the communication, the writer’s intentionality is reflected in his literary work. Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. Therefore, the characters, the plot , the end and so on which constitute the story all exhibit the writer’s intentionality. With the subtitle “ The Story of a Man of Character”, Hardy intends to illustrate the underlying theme in his novel: character is fate, trying to dig out the root of the hero, Henchard’s tragedy from the angle of his character.
Verschueren(1999) proposes that using language consists of the continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously. In the process of making choices, language users know more or less what they are doing when using language. They have metapragmatic awareness of the choices made since it can be betrayed by some indicators which consist of shifters, discourse markers, linguistic action verbs, and so on. So is literary communication between Hardy and his readers because metapragmatic awareness is pervasive in the novel. For example, with a wide range of verbs and verb-like expressions, Hardy vividly describes Henchard’s character and to some extent predicts that his character plays an important role in his destruction.
Character for every person in the society has two layers of meaning: natural character and social character. The former reflects the internal quality of a natural human while the latter refers to the developed, extended or even twisted one of the former in the complex society. Even though Casterbridge is a town, it is still an isolated rural area. And it is being undermined by the arrival of capitalism. From New Marxism perspective, human society is dialectical and historical unity. There is no pure cause and effect relationship. Thus, Hardy’s pessimistic outlook on the world “character is fate” shows his limitation. 

Evaluation of discourse well-formedness----A relevance-theoretical account
科学出版社 张维华 (Zhang Weihua)

There is a long history of studying coherence and there are many different interpretations on coherence. The paper has no intention to discuss the nature of coherence. But instead the paper is intended to discuss how to evaluate discourse coherence—how a reader or listener can evaluate a discourse as coherent or incoherent. The paper is intended to use relevance theory to evaluate discourse coherence. It is because evaluation of discourse coherence involves cognition and relevance theory is named cognitive pragmatics. The paper concludes that the discourse that can satisfy the intuition of well-formedness of a reader or listener is evaluated more coherent than the one that fails to satisfy the intuition of well-formedness and only satisfy the intuition of appropriateness. The degree of coherence of a discourse is in direct proportion with the degree of satisfaction of the intuition of appropriateness.

Exploring cultural identity of Chinese-English bilinguals with Residential experiences in L2 culture
南开大学外国语学院   湖南大学外国语学院
张文忠 (Zhang Wenzhong) 龙剑虹 (Long Jianhong)

To what extent do study-abroad experiences influence Chinese-English bilinguals’ life and work after they return in their native culture? How are they adapted to their native socio-cultural environments? Our study outlines a 4-tendency framework in a description of cultural identities held by Chinese-English bilinguals with one-year or longer residence in English-speaking countries. We present some preliminary findings from interview and questionnaire data collected from 8 subjects. Implications for L2 culture teaching are discussed.

On the disciplinary nature of forensic pragmatics
广东外语外贸大学商务英语学院 张新红（Zhang Xinhong）

The present study, through a detailed analysis of previous literature on the study of language use in the legal settings, outlines two distinct research orientations in forensic pragmatics, i.e., linguistically-oriented and law-oriented forensic pragmatics. It is argued that law-oriented forensic pragmatics, like many other branches in forensic linguistics such as forensic phonetics, forensic dialectology, forensic stylistics, forensic hermeneutics, legislation techniques, and evidence science, is a branch of forensic linguistics which is a sub-discipline of law in that it is designed for the solution of legal problems through linguistic means. Law-oriented forensic pragmatics has developed to such an extent that it now boasts research topics, objectives, achievements and applications of its own. In the last part of the article, it is suggested that more research work should be performed in law-oriented forensic pragmatics in order for pragmatics to serve legal practice better.

On the complementarity of systemic functional linguistics and pragmatics from the meta- perspective
东北师范大学外国语学院 张延飞 (Zhang Yanfei)

This paper is intended to expound upon the relationship between Systemic-Functional Linguistics and Pragmatics from the “meta-” perspective. The prefix “meta-” indicates a change or shift. In particular, as applied to the use of language in philosophy and in the sciences, the prefix “meta-” indicates a shift of “level” in the language we are using or the activities we engage in. It is acknowledged that the application of “meta-” represents the maturation of the science of language.
Halliday inherits and develops Hjelmslev’s view that language system consists of two planes: content plane and expression plane. The content plane is functionally diverse which extends over a spectrum of three distinct models of meaning: ideational, interpersonal and textual. These highly generalized functions of the linguistic system are referred to in his theory as metafunctions, including the ideational metafunction, the interpersonal metafunction and the textual metafunction. These three metafunctions are influenced by three contextual variables: field, tenor and mode.
Various aspects of the study of metalanguage have been developed under the label “metapragmatics” during the last two decades. The earliest, most wide-ranging and most influential usage of this term must be attributed to Michael Silverstein. Metapragmatics is the evaluation the “object of pragmatics” on the higher level, where we discuss the way we define and do pragmatics, and where we debate issues such as why one definition of pragmatics is better than another, what kind of relationship pragmatics has to semantics, how many principles we want to work with in pragmatics, whether or not we should include an activity such as conversational analysis in our pragmatic studies, and so on.
Seemingly metapragmatics in pragmatics and metafunction in systemic functional linguistics are irrelevant to each other. This paper attempts to explore the complementarity of systemic functional Linguistics and pragmatics from their newly-discovered relationship, because these two branches do linguistic research, regarding metalanguage as their target language. It mainly consists of the following four perspectives to explore their relationship: Context; Function; Choice; Discourse marker. From these four perspectives, we can draw a conclusion that there is a high degree of complementarity between Systemic-Functional Linguistics and Pragmatics from the meta- perspective.

A construction grammar analysis of epanadiplosis in Chinese
南京大学外国语学院英语系 张  翼 (Zhang Yi)

Epanadiplosis, as a special and well-studied language phenomena by both Chinese and western scholars, has been approached from different perspectives, but so far no adequate explanation has been offered. The present study makes use of Construction Grammar, and focuses on the core of epanadiplosis in Chinese—the inflexible mapping between form and meaning. It draws reference of the meta-language analysis by Wierzbicka (1982，1987，2004), and puts forward the form and meaning of epanadiplosis in Chinese. In addition to the general epanadiplosis construction the researcher also proposes three sub-constructions categorized by the general epanadiplosis construction. Each of them represents a way to understand the meaning of epanadiplosis in Chinese.

Responding to verbal Irony in discourse: An intention-adaptation approach
上海外国语大学 张  颖 (Zhang Ying)

While irony comprehension has been a heated and much discussed topic, few has explored hearers’ responses to irony in natural conversation, even fewer shed light on intentions of recipients in reacting. This paper is an attempt to probe into irony-responding in discourse with an intention-adaptation approach, heading to achieve a duel objective: to highlight the significance of intention in responses to ironic statements; to examine how varied communicative goals and the process of adaptation cooperate in reacting.

A Study on the Working Mechanisms of Chinese Jokes
北京师范大学/中南大学 张  征 (Zhang Zheng)

Humor is a ubiquitous phenomenon as everyday people will use language. When the use of language makes people laugh, we say there are elements of humor in such linguistic expressions. Humor can be expressed in many ways, such as through one’s performing way, the way one dress himself, the funny tone one carries and the language one use in communication, etc.
Here in this paper we took the last kind of humor, the humorous way in speaking – jokes, to be specific, as our object of study. By relying on the more than one hundred ancient Chinese jokes appeared in Chinese Jokes books, we have a quantitative and qualitative study of Chinese ancient jokes by heavily drawing upon Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance Theory and the Incongruity-Resolution theory of humor. The aim of such study is to give a tentative study on the working mechanisms of Chinese jokes, thus, to understand the ancient literary works, enhance people’s sense of humor and enrich Chinese people’s life as well.

An analysis of deliberate misinterpretation: An adaptation-based approach
南京市金陵科技学院基础部 张志刚 (Zhang Zhigang)

Deliberate misinterpretation, as a pragmatic strategy of speech acts, has attracted great attention of many scholars who conducted their research from different viewpoints like sociology, pragmatics and so on. After reviewing the previous research from the above viewpoints and pointing out their achievements and limitations, the author of the present study attempts to apply Verschueren’s theory of linguistic adaptation to the study of deliberate misinterpretation as a pragmatic strategy of speech acts, proposing that the use of deliberate misinterpretation is a process of making linguistic choices in terms of variability, negotiability and adaptability, discussing the dynamics of its contextual adaptation. The author concludes that deliberate misinterpretations are actually the outcomes of linguistic choices interadaptable with language users’ mental world, social world and physical world.

Minimal structure of visual meaning in multimodal discourse: A cognitive pragmatic approach
政治大學外語學院語言學研究所 張道循 (Zhang Daoxun)

How does our knowledge of language and of context endow us to understand what we are told, to resolve ambiguities, to grasp both explicit and implicit contents, and to appreciate non-literal expressions—metaphor, irony, pun, hyperbole, humour, poetic effects, and, non-verbal communication? These issues have often been approached within linguistic pragmatics and psycholinguistics, whilst with only limited interactions between the two. This paper thus aims to explore the audience's perception, comprehension and interpretation of visual image in multimodal communication , reexamining the explanatory adequacy of Relevance framework (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Forceville 2005) and exploring the significant novelty of experimental pragmatics (Noveck & Sperber 2006).The study attempts to investigate implicit meaning conveyed and enriched in multimodal discourse, trying to explain and render plausible interpretations to the following research questions:
1. What explicit and implicit information and cognitive contextual effects would be perceived and inferred by the (different) receptors through the integration of visual images and linguistic slogans employed within institutionalised discourse / specialised communication?
2. The implicit meaning, especially weak implicatures , will fall into an indeterminate range. Can we regard these as scalar implicatures with different functional loadings?
3. Which inferred salient implicature of implicit meanings could be served as default value?
4. Will the results of this study enhance the explanatory power of Neo-Gricean pragmatic theories in terms of language, cognition and communication, e.g. Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Noveck & Sperber 2006)?

On the valid communication of lies
中国矿业大学外文学院 章礼霞 (Zhang Lixia)

Lies, which are essentially false statements, are capable of communicating validly together with other true statements in our verbal communication. This is closely related to the inferring mechanism of logic. A valid inference involves two steps: true premise and correct reasoning. Formal logic forcedly supposes that the premise be true without particular mechanism to guarantee that, and logic of language has found out that the hypotheses in pragmatic inference is formed via abduction. But abduction features experiential, instant, speculating inferring, and pragmatic presupposition is characteristic of subjectivity, concealment, etc, all contributing to the indefiniteness of premise. With the truth value of premise not guaranteed, logic provides a way for lies of false presuppositions to perform validly in our verbal communication.

Presupposition and inference---two key steps in achieving politeness effect of euphemism
上海师范大学旅游学院 赵德芳 (Zhao Defang)

Traditionally, Orthophemim and euphemism are regarded as polite expressions, while dysphemism is regarded as the impolite expression. But in daily communication, the communicative effect of these utterances---to be polite or to offend---is influenced by the actual context including many factors such as time, place, the relationship of interlocutors and their psychological state. There is no clear dividing line between these expressions in aspect of their effect of politeness or offensiveness. Thus a euphemism may not achieve its desired politeness effect, while a traditional dysphemism may become an appropriate euphemistic expression. This paper analyzes euphemistic expression in perspective of cognitive pragmatics, and points out two important steps in achieving politeness effect of euphemistic expressions: speakers’ presupposition of the cognitive context and hearers’ inference of his cognitive context. In sum, the paper concludes that if the presupposition of cognitive context of both speakers overlaps, the politeness effect will be achieved; if the presupposition and inference do not meet, the politeness effect will not be achieved.

Cooperative principle and pragmatic translation
衡阳师范学院外语系 赵  湘 (Zhao Xiang)

In recent ten years, pragmatics has been a hot topic for linguists. Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker and interpreted by a listener. It is the study of context meaning, and the study of how more gets communicated than is said. It mainly includes deixis, presupposition, the cooperative principle, speech acts, polite principle, conversational implicature and conversational structure. In the cooperative principle, Grice analyzed the conversational implicature. He thought that both the verbal communicative sides wish to have a successful mutual cooperation, and people should follow a certain maxim to reach this purpose. In the verbal communication, if a speaker violated the cooperative principle, the listener should explore the implied meaning in accordance with the context. From this point of view, the value of cooperative principle is not in helping us to analyze the situation people follow the principle, but in exploring the implied meaning. Cooperative principle is a guide line for people’s conversational activity and it has significant meaning in explaining the language communication activity. Cooperative principle is the maxims both for successful language communication and translation activity, because language communication including both oral and written, and translation is a kind of written communication. Therefore, cooperative principle has significant meaning to translation activity. The nature of translation is to represent the original meaning on the basis of accurate understanding of the source language. The research attempts to discuss the relationship between cooperative principle and translation and illustrates the use of the principle in translation.

Effects of explicit instruction on EFL learners’ pragmatic competence development
河北科技师范学院 赵玉荣 (Zhao Yurong)

A quasi-experimental study of explicit pragmatic instruction was conducted to investigate in the context of explicit teaching IF and TO what extent nonnative learners can improve their pragmatic performance; and meanwhile, IF and TO what extent learner factors can have some effects on the outcome of the explicit teaching. The study adopted a speech act perspective. Request act and refusal act were chosen as the teaching targets. As the precedent researches of explicit pedagogical intervention, though all asserting to be explicit teaching, actually took some different teaching methods except sharing one step of metapragmatic information presentation/discussion, the study made a proposal of five tentative guidelines for explicit teaching approach, and designed the present experimental teaching on the basis of them.

Apology strategies between social unequals in A Dream of the Red Mansion
北京外国语大学 赵  韵 (Zhao Yun)

Most of the previous studies of Chinese apologies within the framework of cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP) contributed in the form of quantifying the general apology strategies in Chinese (Huang, 2001; Liu & Liu, 2005). The present qualitative study investigates in-depth twelve episodes of apology between status unequals randomly selected from the first eighty chapters in the Chinese classic novel A Dream of the Red Mansion and proposes an interactional framework of Chinese apology strategies with social status as the main social parameter and with social distance as well as gender as supplementary parameters. The choice of strategies is determined by the interaction of the social parameters and the contextual features in each situation. By following two ways of categorizing apologies, this paper divides apologies into substantive and ritualized apologies. This paper only concentrates on the analysis of substantive apologies and divides it into lower-to-higher-status (L-H) apologies and high-to-lower-status (H-L) apologies. In L-H apologies, speakers are observed to adopt more independence strategies and the self-denigration maxim and address maxim proposed by Gu (1990). The most obvious characteristic of a prototypical H-L apology is its implicitness and its adherence to Leech’s (1983) Sympathy Maxim. Within each category of status unequal apology, apology strategies display different sub-patterns varying according to different social distances. As a result, this paper further proposes a continuum of apology strategies which states that the number of apology strategies adopted by the speaker might increase as the severity of offence increases and the status contrast plus the social distance between the apologizer and the hearer decrease. Besides, gender can be an important social parameter which might violate the general strategy pattern prescribed by social status. Due to men’s superior social status compared to that of women in the traditional Chinese society, men enjoy more freedom to violate the underlying rules of a given apology category.

The pragmatics of topic – A contrastive study
广东外语外贸大学英语教育学院 郑燕梅 (Zheng Yanmei)

It is often observed that Chinese learners of English manifest strong transfer of topic-comment constructions in the use of English. This phenomenon, as believed by many linguists, owns its root cause to that Chinese is a topic-prominent language while English is a subject-prominent language. However, typological difference might not be the only explanation. Topic-comment constructions may not be a problem of grammaticality in English, but in the pragmatic sense, the overuse of it may be proved inappropriate or unacceptable to the native speakers of English. This is because the use of topic structures is subject to pragmatic constraints. The topics thus used must imply speakers’ intentions. Therefore, we will try to figure out, in English and Chinese respectively, what types of topics are frequently used on what occasions. And endeavors will be made to find out the differences that exist and similarities shared between the two languages, to categorize them with pragmatic devices instead of syntactic ones. And their pragmatic forces in the sequencing of turn taking will also be examined. One more point that needs to clarify is that this thesis will mainly focus on those topic constructions in which the topic does not coincide with the subject. Oral data collected from conversations of Chinese and English will be the sources to account for the central claim that will be put forth later. Implications for foreign language teaching can be expected to draw from the analysis of the present study, in the hope that we can help to enhance the learners’ pragmatic awareness in their language performances.

A contrastive study of theory-based classroom discourse--- A perspective of CDA
淮阴工学院外语系  南京师范大学外国语学院
支永碧 (Zhi Yongbi)  王永祥 (Wang Yongxiang)
Based on classroom observations of 15 teachers from 5 different universities, and by virtue of surveys and interviews, we have found that in class, most of the teachers tend to more or less employ linguistic theories such as cognitive-evaluative theory, pragmatic strategies consciously and unconsciously.  But more interestingly and amazingly, in the course of teaching, to different students with different personalities and character, teachers from different backgrounds /(or) of different specialities tend to adopt different strategies, methods and approaches to better classroom atmosphere and enhance （language） teaching efficiency at different times.  In this paper, we analyze the reasons for teachers’ behaving this way.  Based on the interaction hypothesis by Long (1983: 126 – 41), by resorting to Stumpf’s cognitive-evaluative theory of emotion, pragmatic theories, psychological theory and so on, from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA), we make a contrastive study of this phenomenon and have some different findings.  First of all,  teachers (especially language teachers) who are playing new and multiple roles in modern classroom teaching, their cognitive-evaluative languages of emotion and the pragmatic strategies they adopt may have positive effects on classroom interactions and teaching efficiency.  Secondly, influenced by cultural differences and teachers’ individual factors and so on, not all classrrom teachers behave uniformly. This deserves our attention. While some adopt multipurpose pragmatic strategies, cognitive-evaluative languages of emotion and the like, making their class lively and intersting, some others tend to give insufficient attention to the worthwhile linguistic theories and rewarding strategies.  What’s worse, some behave badly in class, making his teaching dull and boring and resulting in students’ negative responses.  Some teachers (especially domestic teachers without equipment of pragmatic theories and so on) even abuse their so-called powers in class, ignoring the appropriate cognitive-evatuative languages of emotion and producing some harmful effect.  We then put forward some suggestions for (would-be) teachers and school authorities.  In this paper, with a view to obtaining more valuable information, we have made both macro- and micro-contrastive studies of classroom discourse, focusing, of course, on the micro-analysis through case studies for the purpose of advocating theory-based classroom discourse through the channel of CDA.

The procedural meaning of Chinese adversative conjunctions danshi / buguo / zhishi
首都师范大学  周  琳 (Zhou Lin)

Chinese grammarians believe that conjunctions play an important role in making implicit relations explicit. It is generally accepted that Chinese adversative conjunctions dan / danshi / keshi / raner / buguo / zhishi are used to signal conflicting relations between phrases, clauses and sentences they link. However, there are only a few studies on the differences among dan / danshi / keshi / buguo / raner have not been fully explained. We make a questionnaire, and the participants are 16 native Chinese speakers from two universities in Beijing, who are university teachers or postgraduate students who specialize in Chinese language. The results of the questionnaire confirm our view that traditional Chinese grammar can not give satisfactory explanation of the acceptability and the unacceptability of the substitution of adversative conjunctions dan / danshi / buguo / zhishi in some cases.

Conversational information and its implicature
湖南工业大学外国语学院 周文伟 (Zhou Wenwei)

Since the creation of the phrase “conversational implicature” by H. P. Grice in 1960s, the theory of CP (conversational implicature) has attracted much of the world’s attention and evolved to be one of the most important theoretical bases of pragmatics. In the past few years, the study on the theory of information has achieved wide-ranged achievements. Further exploring into the depth, we find that the theories of CI and Information are connected somewhere. This essay aims at expounding the producing process of CI from the point of information theory.
This essay consists of five parts. The first serves as a general introduction of CI and information theory. The second part is a definition of conversational information, which is believed to include all the linguistic information exchanged in the process of conversational communication between the speaker and the hearer. Then we come to make an analysis of the pre-requirements of CI in the third part. In this part, we’ll review Sperber and Wilson’s theory of Optimal Relevance, which can be seen as the psychological foundation of conversational implicature in that the speaker’s intention may be understood differently by the hearer. That is to say, sufficient information expressed by the speaker in his utterance may become insufficient on the part of the hearer.  As a result, conversational implicature occurs. Here comes the problem: how to calculate the speaker’s true intention from the conversation -- a problem to be dealt with in the fourth part, in which specific examples are used to illustrate the calculating process of CI in the perspective of conversational information. The fifth and the last part is a summary of the relation between conversational information and conversational implicature.

Bridging: A relevance – adaptation approach
北京师范大学   周小文 (Zhou Xiaowen)  林允清 (Ling Yunqing)

This paper aims at providing a more explanatory treatment to bridging on an improved Relevance-Adaptation based account. Bridging refers to contextual assumption, needed to introduce an intended referent which has not itself been explicitly mentioned. For example: I went into the room; the window was open, in which, although it is not explicitly mentioned, the antecedent assignment of the “window” can still be made. Since its introduction in 1977, bridging has become an increasingly hot issue, having been discussed within various frameworks. Among those different approaches, the most recent three are respectively based on Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (RT), Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory (AT), and a model that combines those two (R-A). After a brief sketch of them, I will point out limitations of previous studies from each perspective: (1) for RT, little consideration of the social and physical context in bridging assignment and the lack of interpretation of the production side; (2) for AT, relatively weak account of the psychological basis of this phenomenon; and (3) for the existing R-A, few detailed illustration. Providing my own appropriate arguments and analysis, I will then arrive at some enlightening points in the following two respects: (1) how to construct a more systematical R-A model in the field of bridging and (2) how to satisfactorily illustrate its working process with more concrete examples. It is hoped that my study will not only improve the existing R-A model of bridging, through which this phenomenon is argued to be explained in a more plausible manner, but provide justification for the this model as a more explanatory perspective that interprets communication as well.

Politeness strategies used in English requests and refusals by Chinese EFL learners
扬州大学外国语学院 朱晓宁 (Zhu Xiaoning)

This paper reports a study on how Chinese college EFL learners used politeness strategies in performing two face-threatening speech acts, requests and refusals. It investigated what politeness strategies were used and examined the effect of contextual variables and language proficiency on strategy choice. Results showed that learners preferred indirectness in both request and refusal situations and contextual variables had considerable effect on the learners’ strategy choice whereas proficiency was found to have little effect. Learners encountered difficulties both pragmalinguistically and sociopragmatically, which were reflected by their scarce use of internal modification on the one hand and their inability to always choose contextually appropriate politeness strategies on the other.

Origin of pragmatic inference: Rhetorical syllogism
淮阴工学院外语系 左  进 (Zuo Jin)

Pragmatic inference is an essential way to actualize the conversational implicature. Little is known about the source for pragmatic inference so far, however. Literatures on this topic are few and even rare. The paper approaches to this issue by looking back to the historical development of both pragmatics and rhetoric. It first outlines pragmatic inference, and then moves on to an analysis on the prevailing pragmatic inferring methods and processes in the belief that pragmatic inference can trace back to the traditional rhetorical syllogism. Through detailed comparison of and contrast between the processes and realizations of modern pragmatic inference and the traditional rhetorical syllogism, the paper concludes that modern pragmatic inference is nothing more than a new form of traditional syllogism. This conclusion sheds new light on the connection between modern pragmatics and traditional rhetoric and helps people understand the origin of pragmatic inference.