A Study On The Cognitive Process Of Pragmatic Information Of Chinese Verbs Based On Eye-tracking Experiment

Lexical pragmatics mainly studies the words in language use,which is one of the most promising fields in contemporary linguistic research.It is not only reflected in the close relationship with daily language use,but also the continuous integration and cooperation with other disciplines such as psychology and neuroscience.At present,some scholars have done many theoretical researches on lexical pragmatics,but there is still a big gap in the study of cognitive process of specific lexical pragmatic information.This research takes five words with pragmatic information as the research objects that were collected from New Exploration in Lexical Pragmatics written by Ran Yongping,in order to study the cognitive process of pragmatic information of Chinese verbs in the human brain with the help of an eye-tracking experiment in psychology.This thesis takes the verb “jie3 dong4” as a representative example and analyzes its data of eye movement.This research is intended to reveal the cognitive process of language in the human brain,and to enrich the meaning of related words in the Chinese dictionary.According to previous studies on lexical pragmatics,the cognitive process of lexical pragmatic information may be the psychological process of the human brain’s information processing.Fodor’s theories of psychological semantics attempt to make a reasonable explanation for the human psychological process.Therefore,this thesis makes the following experimental hypotheses based on Fodor’s language of thought hypothesis and the theory of modularity of mind: this thesis only focuses on the effect of linguistic context on lexical pragmatic understanding.The lexical information is distributed in the language system of the human brain in the form of semantics,and the representation of lexical pragmatic information can only be produced under the constraints of certain context and semantic syntagmatic relation.On this basis,the author assumes that the pragmatic information of words is: in a sentence,due to the constraints of the syntagmatic relation of syntax and semantics,the meanings of some words with semantic relevance are organically superimposed in the cognitive system.Then a temporary module is formed through pragmatic interference.That is,the pragmatic information module.The mental representation of the pragmatic information module of the word is the pragmatic meaning of the word,which has a semantic feature.According to this hypothesis,the author assumes that the cognitive process of lexical pragmatic information should be as follows: the cognitive system of the human brain has the characteristics of semantic relevance and informational encapsulation.Pragmatic inference is carried out on the words with pragmatic temporary meaning under the influence of syntactic and semantic relations,so as to achieve the best relevance and complete understanding of lexical pragmatic information.After that,the thesis designs and implements an eye-tracking experiment to verify and study related issues.The main questions of this thesis are as follows:1)What are the characteristics of the cognitive process of lexical pragmatic information? 2)Is the cognitive process of lexical pragmatic meaning consistent with the modular cognitive mechanism? 3)When some semantic information in a sentence changes,will the lexical pragmatic information of key words change?By analyzing the eye movement trajectories and eye movement indexes of 29 subjects,this thesis draws the following conclusions: 1)Most of the subjects do not decode the words in the sentence one by one,they only focus on some words with semantic syntagmatic relation,The semantic information of these words is organically superimposed in the central system,which leads to the cognitive inference of the verbal pragmatic information;2)The representational form of lexical information in the human brain is indeed semantic.The cognitive system of the human brain has semantic relevance and relatively encapsulated information.The cognitive process of verbal pragmatic information conforms to the modular cognitive mechanism.3)The lexical pragmatic information of key words is derived from the cognitive inference after the semantic superposition of words with semantic relevance in a specific context.Therefore,when some words with semantic relevance in a sentence change,lexical pragmatic information of verbs in the sentence will also change.