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This paper tries to use the construction of cognitive context to analyze A Rose for Emily. As is known to all, the novel tells the life and death of Miss Emily. It is famous for its complex chronology and unique narrative point of view. Many scholars have studied the work from the aspect of literary criticism. However, the literary criticism seldom holds the advantage of pragmatics for analyzing literary works. The present paper, based on the theory of cognitive context, tries to infer the historical background of A Rose for Emily and analyze the two representative events of the novel: the event of collecting taxes and the event of Emily’s love. It shows that the reader’s interpretation of the work is included by using Cognitive Context. And in this way, we can know how the reader interprets the text of the novel and what affects the readers’ understanding of the text.
Ⅱ. Cognitive Context
As an important term, context has a powerful impact on communication and exerts great influence on the generation and interpretation of utterance. Many experts and scholars study the context in different fields and different branches of linguistics. It is Malinowskin(1923) who coined the term “context of situation”. Following him, Firth(1950), Hallionday(1989), Fishman(1965), Lyons(1977), Hymes(1967) also put forward their own version of context. As pragmatics develops into cognitive pragmatics, context gains a new research angle and it develops into cognitive context. Among those various theories, Sperber and Wilson’s version of cognitive context is the most typical one. In 1986, Sperber and Wilson put forward cognitive context from the angle of cognition under the relevance theory, which aims at explaining the forming and the function of context in the process of communication.
Cognitive context is regarded as a psychological construct made up of sets of assumptions that is established and developed in the course of interaction in order to choose correct interpretation. When interpreting literary works, the reader first forms contextual assumptions and combines them with new information supplied by the writer to extract contextual effects and finally understands the writer’s communicative intention, as an inferential process taking place in cognitive context. The reader can extend the initial context according to previous utterance, encyclopedic information, and information about the immediately observable environment.
Before we start to represent cognitive context we should first introduce another term cognitive environment in order to more appropriately approach to the target. Living in the same physical world, human beings undertake acquiring information from the outside world and constructing best possible mental representation of it from birth to death. These mental representations make up an inpidual’s cognitive environment. Because of differences in physical environment and especially in cognitive capabilities, inpidual’s cognitive environment varies from one to another. An inpidual’s cognitive environment is defined as a set of facts manifest to him. To be manifest means to be perceived or inferred. A cognitive environment includes information he can perceive from the outside world, which he was stored in his memories: long-term, short-term and perceptual, and which he can infer from the former two sources. Therefore, it consists of not only all the facts and assumptions that he is aware of, but also all the facts and assumptions that he is capable of becoming aware of.(Sperber&Wilson 39)
Based on cognitive environment, Sperber& Wilson further proposed their notion of the context: it is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s cognitive environment. It is these assumptions rather than the actual states of the world, which affect the interpretation of an utterance. The context in this sense is not limited to information about the immediate physical environment or the immediately preceding utterances: expectations of the future, scientific hypotheses, or religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental state of the speaker, may all play a role in the interpretation.(Sperber& Wilson 14) As is seen, cognitive context is regarded as part of cognitive environment, immediately functioning in interpretation. And cognitive environment can supply possible source for construction of cognitive context.