| As a special quote form,scare quotes are usually used for some certain purposes,instead of conveying warnings literally.They are common phenomena in news discourses and important indirect means for reporters to express views with certain attitudes,positions or ideology.This research takes scare quotes in news about trade war(from Xinhua News Agency,the Associated Press,Reuters)as examples and uses the UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 to take statistics and analyze the distribution differences between English and Chinese news.It also analyzes the types,pragmatic inference and functions of scare quotes from the social,cognitive and contextual dimensions respectively,under the guidance of Neo-Cognitive Pragmatics theory.It is found that:(1)Overall,the proportion of scare quotes in news is second only to direct quotes.Scare quotes have a relatively high frequency.Respectively,there are differences in the distributions of scare quotes among the three media.The proportion of scare quotes in Xinhua News Agency is much higher than that of direct quotes,while the distributions in the Associated Press and Reuters are the opposite.Besides,there are far more scare quotes in Chinese news than English news.The main reason for these differences lies in two aspects:first,there are several editorial articles in the randomly collected Chinese news,which provides a stage for scare quotes.Second,the language differences between China and Western countries affect the writing styles.(2)From the perspective of pragmatic inference,based on the degree of contextual dependence and inference complexity,scare quotes can be divided into two types:scare quotes with simple inference and scare quotes with complex inference.Based on the classification,this research combines social,cognitive and contextual factors into the pragmatic inference analysis,and then obtains two inference patterns.In these two patterns,there are differences in the action degree of the three major factors.In the first pattern,readers can infer the main meaning of scare quotes on the basis of social and cognitive factors.The action degree of contextual factors is slightly lower.In the second pattern,contextual factors have a limiting effect on meaning inference.After readers obtain the meaning of scare quotes from social and cognitive factors,they will further infer the most appropriate meaning according to contextual factors,thus producing a certain cognitive tendency.Contextual factors limit the inference direction and choice of the meanings.It can be seen that Neo-Cognitive Pragmatics has a strong explanatory power to the pragmatic inference of scare quotes.To analyze the inference from three dimensions is of rationality and operability.(3)Scare quotes have the following six functions:(a)emphasizing;(b)distancing;(c)indicating pragmatic inference;(d)expressing certain attitudes;(e)avoiding inappropriate or odd;(f)identifying special expressions.Besides,in practice,scare quotes often have multiple functions at the same time.This study aims to enrich the research contents of quotation and Neo-Cognitive Pragmatics so as to promote the development of interdisciplinary research.Meanwhile,it also helps readers improve their understanding of scare quotes,and enhance their news sensitivity and critical awareness. |
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