Abstract:

The previous study of the comprehension mechanism of pragmatic fuzziness based on cognitive linguistics is limited to relevance theory, adaptation theory, and spatial compounding theory and tends to be carried out from the perspective of the speaker, which lacks novelty. This paper explores the mechanism from the perspective of the addressee and puts forward the theory of the idealized cognitive model (ICM), which has strong explanatory power for this mechanism. The reason is that each type of discourse communication in the same language community has a programmed ICM, which can produce a prototype effect and provide a simple and ideal cognitive framework for people to understand the world. After the addressee perceives the conflict between the utterance and the context, he focuses on the abnormal points of the utterance, restores the ideal conventional utterance ICM, and in the process of backtracking reasoning, compares it with the difference between the fuzzy utterance and completes the damaged optimal relevance, to find out the real intention of the speaker. This greatly reduces the retrieval scope of locating the speaker’s intention and reduces the difficulty of interpreting the speaker’s hidden intention. The research aims to improve people’s pragmatic competence and provide theoretical support for the formalization of pragmatic fuzzy discourse understanding.

Key words: pragmatic fuzziness, comprehension mechanism, idealized cognitive model (ICM), prototype effect