A Cognitive Account Of Pragmatic Function Of Metalinguistic Negation

In the previous study, metalinguistic negation had aroused heated discussions from the perspective of pragmatic, and there is little study being put to analyzing metalinguistic negation from the cognitive perspective. So far, most scholars try to find out the definition of metalinguistic negation, and seek for the way to unscramble metalinguistic negation. However, they failed to take the internal mechanism into account. They studied the relationship between metalinguistic negation and pragmatic negation. But they do not clearly find out the internal mechanism of pragmatic function of metalinguistic negation. Therefore, actually, the meaning is the communicators’ intention, which is just based on the situation of communicating. So the study of metalinguistic negation must take communicators and the context into consideration. For the study of metalinguistic negation, scholars should take into account the communicators themselves, and the situation that they are involved in. The idealized model that receivers set means communicators chose hypothesis model under a special situation as background knowledge in order to make their communication smoothly. So metalinguistic negation takes place between two ICMs, while other negations just happen in an ICM.This paper aims at solving the following questions.(1) How do the receivers decode metalinguistic negation? (2) What is the internal mechanism of pragmatic function of metalinguistic negation?(3) How can the findings of the current research be applied to EFL teaching and learning?This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is the introduction, followed by a short research background, the objectives of research, the significance of the research and the structure of the present thesis. Chapter Two is the literature review, which expounds previous studies on metalinguistic negation, focusing on its pragmatic, semantic and cognitive properties. Chapter Three is the theoretical framework which includes the nature of metalinguistic negation, the notion of cognitive context and the notion of ICM. Chapter Four is to explain pragmatic function of metalinguistic negation from the cognitive view. It is the main part of this paper. Firstly, this part describes the pragmatic function of metalinguistic negation. Second, it explains the internal mechanism of pragmatic function of metalinguistic negation. Chapter Five concludes the whole paper and supplies some major findings and limitations of this study.As an important part of negation and natural linguistic phenomenon, metalinguistic negation has drawn more and more attention of researchers in recent years. However it is noteworthy that much attention has been focused on its semantic and pragmatic characteristics and few endeavors have been made on explaining metalinguistic negation from the cognitive view. Therefore, this paper will apply cognitive theories to explaining the internal mechanism, and highlight the significance of study, and divide the significance into two parts which include its communicative significance and teaching significance.