Selection And Adaptation

In contemporary pragmatics, the Anglo-American school focuses only on concrete issues, such as deixis, conversational implicature, presupposition, speech acts and conversational structure; compared with them, in the European Continental tradition, on the other hand, pragmatics is defined in a far broader way, even touching upon much that goes under the rubric of Cultural Anthropology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. The pragmatic perspective is a marvelous flower evolving from the European Continental tradition in the late 90s of last century. To analyze and investigate such a ubiquitous linguistic and cognitive phenomenon as metaphor from the special angle of pragmatic perspective theory is a matter of great significance, which deserves close attention in contemporary pragmatic research.How do people use metaphors? Although the original pragmatic theories have taken context into account, an explanation of the internal structure of context system is not available, nor the concrete relationship between various elements of context and the use of metaphor. The explanations of the established theories are independent of, as well as inconsistent with each other. Furthermore, the generative and interpretative mechanisms of the metaphor also remain vague. The interdisciplinary and inclusive property of pragmatic perspective enables us to integrate and develop these explanations.In consideration of what has been mentioned above, the pragmatic perspective has been taken in the dissertation as the theoretical starting point to investigate the whole process of generation, existence and interpretation of metaphor, with practical Chinese language as our linguistic data, so that the question "how do people use metaphors?" can be expounded in a consistent and coherent theoretical framework. The first chapter reviews the inquiries of metaphor within Grice's theory of conversational implicature, Searle's theory of speech acts as well as Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory; traces the western cognitive research on metaphor and the development history of metaphoric thought in our country; and points out the necessity and urgency of theoretical integration. The second chapter not only expatiates the feasibility and reasonableness of studying metaphor from the pragmatic perspective of inter-disciplinary theory and applicable methodology, but also demonstrates the objects, goals, and main innovative points of this research. The third chapter enunciates, from the angle of optimal adaptability, the close relationship between metaphor generation and addressor's (speaker's) pursuit of optimal adaptation in language choices, and thereby explains "why do people use metaphor so frequently". Chapter four puts forward, from the aspect of negotiability, the principles and strategies for choosing the source domain. When addressors choose metaphor to express a specific idea or feeling, they should take a full consideration of their own cognitive conditions and the addressees' (hearers') cognitive contexts as well, and weigh the accessibility, acceptability and assumability, so as to make an adaptable choice. In chapter five, according to the variability of metaphor, metaphors can be looked on as animate being with a course of emerging, propagating and dying out. The emergence of metaphor results from changes of reference and regulation of signification, which, from the connectionist point of view, is the establishment of connection between two neuron networks. After its emergence, the metaphor proliferates by means of quantitative changes or qualitative changes, and withers away with the petrifaction of reference and signification. Chapter six turns to the analysis of the interpretation of metaphors. As far as interpretative choices are concerned, the investigation...