PHONETIC AMBIGUITY AND THE MECHANISM OF ITS GENERATION AND PERCEPTION AT THE COGNITIVE-PRAGMATIC LEVEL

Abstract

The article examines phonetic ambiguity in the Russian and Chinese languages from the standpoint of the relevance theory and reveals its cognitive-pragmatic processes of identification and perception during communication. In this regard, the author gives the main types of phonetic ambiguity of the Russian and Chinese languages, conducts a comparative analysis of the features of phonetic ambiguity in the two languages and describes the main provisions of the relevance theory. Based on the conducted research, the author comes to the following conclusions: the relevance theory can provide a good theoretical basis for studying the problem of ambiguity in communication, it has a strong explanatory power in explaining the mechanism of generating and eliminating phonetic ambiguity at the pragmatic and cognitive-psychological levels; The degree of relevance has a direct impact on achieving a perlocative-cognitive effect, eliminating ambiguity and successful mutual understanding of interlocutors. In addition, the ostensive-inference model also opens up the possibility of studying the process of dynamic interaction of communicants–both parties strive for a minimum expenditure of processing efforts to obtain maximum cognitive effects. To do this, the speaker must try to make the intention obvious by sending ostensive stimuli, and the listener must make a conclusion based on the information extracted from the cognitive context, in particular, the information transmitted by the author by means of ostensive stimuli, correctly identify the speaker’s information and communication intention; ambiguity cannot be eliminated when the cognitive contexts of the speaker and the listener do not coincide with each other, which will lead to misunderstanding.