An Iconic Approach To The Morphosyntactic Representations Of English Indirect Speech

This thesis is devoted to the cognitive motivations of the morphosyntactic representations of English indirect speech (IS) from the perspective of Iconicity Theory within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. Direct Speech (DS) and IS have long been studied in all branches of linguistics and philosophy. Philosophers try to define quotation by comparing its forms, which sets the foundation for linguistic explorations of quotation. Traditional approaches to DS and IS were confined to pedagogy, focusing on the changing rules between DS and IS. Studies from the perspective of pragmatics and translation concern more on the different conversational effects of DS and IS than the morphosyntactic representations of English IS. Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) discusses the morphosyntactic representations of English IS via concepts of "projection" and "embedding", and reaches some agreements. However, the cognitive motivations of the morphosyntactic changes of English IS still deserve further investigations.Emerging in the late 1980s, Cognitive Linguistics is a linguistic research paradigm which is designed to study the cognitive motivations of language phenomena. As an integral part of Cognitive Linguistics, Iconicity Theory aims to figure out the cognitive motivations of language expressions by examining the relationship between cognitive structure and language structure. Therefore, this thesis attempts to approach the morphosyntactic representations of English IS from the perspective of Iconicity Theory and it is discussed from the following two aspects: (1) what are the cognitive motivations of the morphological representations of English IS? and (2) what are the cognitive motivations of the syntactic representations of English IS?This thesis identifies itself as a qualitative study, so the non-closed data are collected from:(1) literature of English grammar and modern literary works; (2) data the author collected online. Under the iconicity between conceptual structure and language structure, this thesis attempts to propose an axis model and discusses the cognitive motivations of the morphosyntactic representations of English IS of English IS. It is concluded that (1) the cognitive motivation of the morphological representations of English IS lies in distance iconicity; (2) the syntactic representations of English IS are cognitively represented by distance iconicity and quantity iconicity.The present study boasts two contributions. First, this thesis discusses the cognitive motivations of the morphosyntactic representations of English IS, which is expected to enhance the understanding of related morphosyntactic rules between DS and IS and promote the researches on the transformation of quotation forms. Second, the discussions of the cognitive motivations of English IS morphosyntactic representations also shed some light on Second Language Learning and Acquisition.