（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）基于归因论的言语理解研究.pdf

ii 摘摘 要要 心理学和语言学密切相关，语言的使用是一种心理活动，人的心理活动大多 依赖语言符号，心理语言学的出现和发展使心理学和语言学的关系更加密切。 语言产出和理解的过程是心理语言学的一个研究重点， 人们理解和产生语言 是心理语言学研究的本质。众所周知，语言是人类重要的交际工具，而言语交际 是人类社会活动中不可缺少的重要组成部分。在交际过程中，我们不仅要准确、 恰当地表达自己的思想，还要正确理解交际另一方的言语。交际双方对对方言语 的理解是能否进行成功交际的关键和前提，因此，对言语理解的研究具有重要的 实践价值。 本文在社会心理学的一个理论归因论的基础上分析和讨论了言语 理解的动态过程。 作者把凯利的方差模型作为本文的理论框架。凯利认为，人们在对特定的社 会行为进行归因时，可供选择的原因不外乎三类：个人方面的原因，如心情、个 性、态度等；刺激对象方面的原因，如活动对象的特点等；环境方面的原因，如 环境气氛、外界压力等。个人、刺激对象和环境就是归因活动中的自变量，形成 的某一结果是因变量。协变原则揭示了要判断某一结果是否由某个自变量引起， 就要看它是否随着这个自变量的变化而变化，也就是说，在归因者眼里，如果某 个结果随着某个自变量的变化而变化，那么这个结果就可以归因为这个自变量。 影响言语理解的变量是听者、话语本身和语境，具体而言就是，如果听者有着很 强的理解力，或者话语本身就很清楚，没有歧义，语境也被充分考虑，那么话语 就能被正确理解。 关键词：关键词：言语理解；归因论；动态过程 i abstract psychology is closely related to linguistics. the use of language is a kind of mental activity; mental activity of people mostly depends on language symbols. the emergence and development of psycholinguistics mark that the relationship between psychology and linguistics is closer. the process that people understand and produce language is the essence of psycholinguistics study. as we all know, language is an important communication tool of mankind, and verbal communication is an important and necessary component of human social activities. in the actually verbal communication process, we should not only express our ideas accurately and appropriately, but also correctly understand the speech of the other side of the communication. correct comprehension of each others utterance is the key and prerequisite to carry through verbal communication successfully. therefore, the study of verbal comprehension is valuable in practice. based on one of social psychological theoriesattribution theory, the author analyzes and discusses the dynamic process of verbal comprehension. there are several attribution models, among which the author chooses kellys analysis of variance (anova) as the framework of the thesis. in the anova model, the independent variables constitute the three possible ways of examining variations in effects: (1)over persons, such as mood, personality and attitude; (2)over entities, such as the characteristics; (3)over time/modality, such as the circumstance, stress from outside. the dependent variable is whether the effect occurs or not. the covariation principle suggests that the effect is seen as caused by the factor with which it covaries. that is to say, the attributor ascribes an effect to the cause with which it covaries. in regard to verbal comprehension, the three variations are listeners, utterances and context. whether an utterance can be understood or not depends on the utterance itself, the listener and the context. to be more specific, if the listener has a good ability of comprehension, if the utterance itself is clear and unambiguous, and if the context is considered completely, the utterance can be comprehended correctly. key words: verbal comprehension; attribution theory; dynamic process 1 chapter one introduction 1.1 introduction language is an integral part of our life and humanity. it is a means of verbal communication. it is instrumental in that communicating by speaking or writing is a purposeful act. it is social and conventional in that language is a social semiotic and communication can only take place effectively if all the users share a broad understanding of human interaction including such associated factors as nonverbal cues, motivation, and socio-cultural roles. it is difficult to think of many human activities that do not involve communication. we communicate with friends and with strangers, at work and at play, in public and in private. we communicate our knowledge and our ignorance, our anger and our pleasure, our needs and our intentions. just as communication serves a variety of purposes it assumes a variety of forms. we may communicate by writing a book or making a speech, with a torrent of words or with one, with a grunt or with silence, by waving our arms or by raising our eyebrows. in some cases the means is chosen with great deliberation and care. in others the choice is spontaneous and virtually unconscious. in this chapter, the author will introduce the object, rationale and objective of the study, as well as the problems unsolved in the existing studies. 1.2 the object of the present research speech interaction is relatively updated and important because we communicate with different people every day and speech interaction plays an important role in them. when we meet people in the street and greet each other and this greeting is an interaction between listeners and speakers, and the representative code of this interaction is spoken language. communication in spoken language is the main means of interaction, and there are also some other kinds of interactive processes, for example, when we read newspapers or books and get some new information through the internet, in which interaction also takes placebetween writers and readers, and the code is written language. a complete verbal communication process should include two aspectslanguage a study on verbal comprehension: an attribution theory approach _ 2 production and language interpretation, which are complementary to each other. verbal communication activities are the completion of both sidesthe speakers and the listeners. from the view of listeners, if the utterance can not be comprehended, they cannot make a correct response, thus communication is difficult to continue; from the view of the other side, if the listeners cannot decode the utterance, communication purpose can not be achieved. then the speakers must promptly adjust and change the speech strategies. so comprehension is of great importance in verbal communication. because as the communication goes on, the roles of the speaker and the listener are changing, not only the listeners must make every effort to understand, but also the speakers also need to understand. the dialogue following is a good example. a: whats on television? b: (consulting the newspaper) nothing. does b mean literally nothing? since the television stations are not on strike and it is just a usual night. the government hasnt banned television casually. a will assume that b really meant “nothing worth watching”. as a matter of fact, at the same time b has already known the intention of a. b knows a doesnt only want to know whats on television. what a wants is valuable information that is whether there is interesting program to watch. that being the case, to take verbal comprehension as the object of this study, exploring in depth its nature, characteristics and so on, revealing its dynamic process is a significant task. 1.3 the rationale of the research the main forces which drive the author to explore the dynamic process of verbal comprehension are based on the following considerations. the first one is that verbal comprehension is important and necessary in daily life. enhancing the study of verbal comprehension and exploring the rules of it can help people to improve the effectiveness and quality of verbal communication, thereby enhance understanding, and reduce friction, which is also useful for building a harmonious society. it is indicated that contradictions, even quarrels and assaults between people in daily life may result from a variety of complex reasons, but misunderstanding is usually one of them. therefore, it is necessary for people to improve verbal comprehension. 3 secondly, from the beginning of the last century, the researches to integrate psychology and linguistics became popular. by studying psychology, people can know themselves much better. and language is always an important domain of psychology. it is a natural trend to combine psychology and linguistics as one subject to study, that is, psycholinguistics. psycholinguistics borrows a lot of knowledge and research methods from psychology in their own study. it is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures. it sometimes also produces findings which make their own mark on linguistic research, leading to the modification of theoretical ideas. the three major strands of psycholinguistic research are: (1) how do people use their knowledge of language, and how do they comprehend what they hear or read? (2) how do they produce utterances that others can comprehend in turn? (3) how language is represented in the mind and how language is acquired? the study will focus on the first strand. that is, how do people comprehend what they hear? last but not least, attribution theory is important development in social psychology. heiders analysis of “nave” or common sense psychology provided the most important foundation for contemporary attribution theory and research. according to heider, causal explanation or attribution is fundamental to common sense, because “attribution in terms of impersonal and personal causes, and with the latter, in terms of intent, are everyday occurrences that determine much of our understanding of and reaction to our surroundings” (heider,1958:16). attribution theory concerns the process by which an individual interprets “as being caused by particular parts of the relatively stable environment” (heider, 297). and attribution refers to the process of inferring or perceiving the dispositional properties of entities in the environment. as far as verbal comprehension is concerned, the process of comprehending is at the same time a process of attribution. why do listeners comprehend the utterance this way but not that way? that is because the listeners are making attributions in the whole process of comprehension. they are making choices in several factors which influence their judgments and then make decisions. then a certain way of comprehension comes out. 1.4 problems unsolved in the existing studies although verbal comprehension have been discussed in many fields, there are some problems that are unsolved. a study on verbal comprehension: an attribution theory approach _ 4 firstly, the study of verbal communication should involve expression and comprehension. because there is no one-way communication, and there is no exchange of information only with beginning but without end. that is, the end of expression does not mean the end of verbal communication. if people only concern about the expression, a complete theoretical framework can not be established and many phenomena can not be explained. needless to say, so far most language studies have been concentrating on the expression. comprehension is always avoided for some reason. such a sink-handicapping status must be changed. to study verbal comprehension and resume its significant position in verbal communication can contribute to building a scientific theory of verbal communication. secondly, schools of modern linguistics focus on static, closed, the ideal language system, such as american structuralism. they pay little attention to the process of verbal communication in certain context. the consequences of such researches are separating speech from context. thus instead of putting speech in certain social surroundings, they study the structures of speech isolatedly. this kind of study has some limitations, because it can not explain how implied meaning is generated, transferred and comprehended. only from the dynamic process of verbal communication, can the answers be revealed. thirdly, language is internally structured on several grammatical levels (chomsky 1965), and is pragmatically organized at certain levels of communicative function (searle 1969). but the interpretation of actual utterances is a situated accomplishment, depending crucially on several kinds of contexts (garfinkel 1967, cicourel 1974, hymes 1974, volosinov 1973). given, then, that speech is both structured and situated; a central problem for any theory of utterance interpretation is to determine how grammatical knowledge interacts with participants interpretive procedures for arriving at mutual comprehension. the central questions of concern to us here are: how do participants use linguistic forms in social scenes as units of interpretation in organizing their conversation and other concerted activities? what range of contexts determines the interpretation of talk? and how can these contexts be described and validated as the participants own categories? two kinds of approaches to these questions are considered. the first is based upon the analysis of linguistic forms, and attempts to account for what a speaker must know in order to interpret utterances. this linguistic approach assumes that speakers share an overlapping lexicon, grammar, and repertoire of speech act functions that are performed by using 5 the lexicon grammar. the products of linguistic analysis are accounts of lexical senses of words, propositional readings expressed by sentences, and the speech acts conventionally conveyed by utterance forms. for the problem of utterance interpretation, the limitations of the linguistic approach are several: most words have several senses; many sentences are multiply ambiguous as to which propositions they express; and virtually all speech acts are multifunctional and often equivocal as to what acts (as well as what level of act) they convey (labov it attempts to account for what participants are doing with their conversation such that they can achieve consensus about what is going on at a given moment. this approach assumes that talk, without reference to the particulars of its use, is fundamentally indeterminate; and that, in the course of organizing sensible moment with each other, people use talk as a social tool, relying on the social work they are doing together to specify the meaning of utterances. the products of such analyses are descriptions of the behaviors which people use in organizing each other, and accounts of the various kinds of contexts which they organize together. the limitations of interactional approaches are that the analyst must first discover the units of behavior to which the participants are oriented; the particular contexts, frames, or constrains which are most immediately in effect; and the ways in which the most immediate contexts are embedded in more inclusive social and institutional contexts (also available in the behavior of the participants). fortunately for the analyst, people in their behavior with each other try out various suggestions as to what they are doing together. the complexity of this material, however, makes analysis slow. interactional approaches to utterance interrelation run the risk of being too specific; if units of analysis must be continually discovered in-situ, new ways of generalizing from one scene to another must be articulated. 1.1 the objective of the study a core issue of the study of pragmatics is how listeners confirm the utterance a study on verbal comprehension: an attribution theory approach _ 6 meaning when facing multiple interpretations. the task of the listeners is to correctly comprehend what the speakers expect, while one of the tasks of pragmatics is to explain the process of understanding the utterance meaning. this study aims to analyze the process of verbal comprehension from the perspective of attribution theory, in order to draw a conclusion that the process of verbal comprehension is that of attribution. 1.2 outline of the thesis in the first chapter, the subject of the research is introduced. in the second chapter, main approaches to study verbal comprehension are summarized. the framework of the thesis is introduced in the third chapter. the fourth chapter is the core of the thesis, in which the affecting factors and the dynamic process of verbal comprehension are analyzed and discussed through examples. in the last chapter, a conclusion is drawn that the process of verbal comprehension is at the same time a process of attribution. chapter two a review of the relevant literature 7 chapter two a review of the relevant literature 2.1 introduction meaning is a subject which a number of scholars concern about. traditional semantics regards meaning as intrinsic and abstract property of language. pragmatics studies language use in a particular context. as the process of communication is essentially a process of conveying and comprehending meaning in a certain context, pragmatics can also be regarded as a kind of meaning study. from the perspective of pragmatics, there are two different levels of meaning: sentence meaning and utterance meaning. suppose somebody says to you “youre a foolish guy.”, you would more often than not retort “what do you mean?” it is not that you do not know the meaning of any word in the sentence, or the words are combined in a too complicated way for you to understand. you know perfectly well the reference of “you”, the sense of “foolish”, and the meaning of the sentence. what you do not know is the speakers intention in uttering this sentence, what he intends the sentence to mean. or rather, you do know the speakers intention, but you want to use “what do you mean?” as a denial of what he has asserted. you used your own sentence with a meaning other than the conceptual. this kind of meaning is utterance meaning. it differs from sentence meaning because its interpretation depends more on who the speaker of the sentence is, who the hearer is, when and where it is used. in a word, it depends more on the context. therefore, while the meaning of a sentence is abstract, decontextualizd, and that of an utterance is concrete, and context-dependent. the mea