A Tentative Exploration of Cultural Pragmatic Inference of American Utterances

This paper takes real utterances in the American cultural context as its object of study.With the principle of cultural relevance as its guideline, it explores a pattern of cultural pragmatic inferencing by highlighting focal utterances and conversation.An interpreting order is indicated by starting its work from its utterance-internal to whole utterances and utterance sequences in conversations, and taking the macro-cultural structure as a defining framework of cultural context.An interpretation-friendly, cultural assumption framework that can best represent the mainstream cultural ideological system as the basis of cultural rationality of a given speech community is elaborated for an authoritative, valid and feasible cultural pragmatic interpretation of situated utterances and their probable cultural functions.