| Metaphor is pervasive in language. The study of metaphor in terms of cognition is a very important part in linguistic study, and metaphor interpretation is a central issue in metaphor study. Although many researchers have made many enlightening contributions to metaphor interpretation, the study of metaphor interpretation still lacks authoritative theory to serve as a guide. This thesis aims at applying relevance theory to discuss the role of cognitive context in metaphor interpretation, choosing American news as models.The relevance theory establishes the foundation of the cognitive pragmatics and has the great explanatory power for metaphor. Based on the traditional context, the notion of cognitive context is proposed in relevance theory. This thesis illustrates the process of understanding the metaphorical meaning at the angle of cognitive context in terms of relevance theory; namely metaphor interpretation is a process during which the audience attempts to select relevant assumptions which have adequate contextual effect in one's cognitive context in order to infer the implication of the utterance or discourse with the least efforts according to relevant principles. That is to say, metaphor interpretation is the process to select relevant context in the cognitive context.Study of ostensive-inferential communication,contextual effects and cognitive principle can improve people's cognitive competence for cognitive context and be conducive to metaphor interpretation. In this thesis, metaphor is classified in perspective of its cognitive function as well as syntactic feature. It focuses on studying metaphor interpretation mechanism via the dynamic effects of cognitive context, taking American news for examples to reveal the nature of metaphor interpretation. Consequently, the application scope of relevance theory in pragmatics is expanded; meanwhile the role of cognitive context in metaphor interpretation is analyzed and elaborated in detail.
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