Author(s)

Ruihong Huang

Teaching Center, Zhejiang Open University, Hangzhou, China.

Pragmatic ambivalence refers to a linguistic phenomenon in which the communicator uses vague or ambiguous words to convey the illocutionary force to the other party in a specific context. It is an indispensable communicative strategy for successful communication in daily communication activities. Relevance theory can explain pragmatic ambivalence from three aspects: intentional relevance, contextual relevance and relevance reasoning. Therefore, relevance theory has strong explanatory power and applicability for pragmatic ambivalence as a communicative strategy. Using relevance theory to study pragmatic ambivalence is conducive to people’s further understanding of pragmatic ambivalence as a linguistic phenomenon, and has a very positive significance for the research and development of ambivalence in pragmatics.

Pragmatic Ambivalence, Relevance Theory, Illocutionary Force

Huang, R. (2021) Analysis of Pragmatic Ambivalence from the Perspective of Relevance Theory. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 9, 1-10. doi: 10.4236/jss.2021.95001.