A Cognitive Study Of Language Reports

The initial research on language reports was restricted within the grammatical descriptions, which place emphasis on direct and indirect speech and the transformational relationship between them. In grammar books and language textbooks, there seems to be a general agreement that they refer to a clear linguistic category which needs little definition. However, the non-canonical use of language reports prove that such descriptions fail to provide a comprehensive explanation for this phenomenon. These years the emergence of stylistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis has given rise to some new developments in the study of language reports. In contrast to the traditional approaches which are constrained by their focus on the syntactic changes, recent researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the rhetoric and pragmatic functions of language reports. Among them are Leech and Short(1985), Coulmas (1985), Tannen (1989),Baynham (1996), Thompson (1996), 申丹(1991)徐赳赳(1996),辛斌(1998),李战子(2000),贾中恒(2000), et al. They all have made great contributions to the discussion of language reports, but there have been few explicit studies addressing the cognition-related aspects of these reports. Tannen explores the conversational functions of reported speech in oral communication. Baynham suggests us to study reported speech in a specific discourse or context. 申丹is concerned with the different forms and their functions in literary works. 辛斌makes a critical study of the discourse-pragmatic functions of reported speech in news reports, and investigates in what way the reporter uses it to convey his/her own point of view. 贾中恒focuses his attention mainly on the pragmatic functions of reporting speech only. However, he points out in his paper that in specific context, reporting speech itself may evoke some of its potential speech act. It can be seen that he has already noticed some of the aspects related to human cognition in the process of language reporting. Theoretically, however, he fails to make a deep and detailed study on this phenomenon. Based on previous research, the present paper is mainly intended to take as its subject the cognitive features involved in the use of language reports. To be specific, it explores further the nature of language reports and how the cognitive factors affect the production of language reports. For example, how human beings' perception, experience and their ways of observing the world affect the use of language reports? Particularly, other things being equal, how can we choose different reporting modes to express those nonlinguistic meanings? How the meaning of language reports is construed in human mind? All these questions need to be answered in the present study. It is argued that since language reports are shaped by the interplay of linguistic and non-linguistic factors, they can be best explained in a theoretical framework which represents a knowledge-for-use conception. A cognitive approach to language reports reveals that cognitive mechanisms are responsible for the meaning of reported language and can also account for the meaning structure of these linguistic expressions.Our first task is to define the term 'language report' for the purpose of this dissertation. To overcome the inadequacies of previous approaches as reviewed in chapter 2, language reports are redefined from cognitive perspective in Chapter 3. They are identified according to whether another voice is evoked, whether by language schema or other knowledge structures. Following this idea, we define language reports as a particular form of discourse where the reporter intends to evokeanother voice in the hearer/reader's mind, through language schema or other knowledge structures to achieve his communicative or extra-communicative goals in a given context.Chapter 4 attempts to combine the insights of cognitive psychology, cognitive sciences and cognitive linguistics, and apply cognitive theories extensively to the study of language reports. It is not solely c...