Image Schema In The Process Of Meaning Construction

From cognitive pragmatic perspective, meaning construction is conceptualization constraint by context, which is also the process of reasoning and inferencing. In the process of meaning construction, there are two kinds of speech acts. One is direct speech act; the other is indirect speech act. most of the direct speech acts do not need meaning construction process, however, the implicature of indirect speech act cannot be obtained through explicitly expression ,the speaker's real intention need further process of inference and meaning construction. This dissertation intends to the study of cognitive mechanism of meaning construction of indirect speech act (IDA), and outlines the underlying mechanism of IDA use on the basis of an integrated MM-based pragmatic reasoning model. The dissertation is mainly focused on the study of the cognitive mechanism to get the meaning of indirect speech act, that is, the meaning of in direct speech can be achieved by metonymic inference, and it is proposed that image schema is a cognitive basis of metonymy. In the dissertation image schema is categorized into Container schema and Part-whole schema. In all, within the theoretical framework of cognitive pragmatics, this dissertation is emphasized on how image schema plays a role in the inferential process via metonymy to get the real meaning which is constrained by context. Specifically, the dissertation follows Panther and Thornburg's idea on metonymy, that is the operation of metonymy in indirect speech act has the part-whole feature of inferential metonymy, and pointed out that the traditional theory which usually assume that the interpretation of utterance of speaker meaning requires inferential capacities on the part of the addressee of the communicative act, don't systematically specify the kinds of inference patterns needed for utterance interpretation. So the reason for the focus on the study of the dissertation is twofold. On the one hand, this dissertation intends to explore how the cognitive mechanism-image schema functions via metonymy in meaning constructions of indirect speech acts. The relationship between metonymy and indirect speech acts is the newly explored discipline starting from Panther and Thornburg (1999). On the other hand, the study of indirect speech has undergone a history of nearly a century, yet little serious attempts have been made to deal with this aspect.The most important method is used in the dissertation is abductive reasoning method and the data are collected from Chinese context to study image schema working with metonymy in indirect speech, for the limitation of the space, the study is especially on container-content schema and part-whole schema. Based on the analysis of the case study, three general principles are found:Principle one: there are also some cultural differences and subjectivity of human beings which result in the discrepancies when reader/hearer interprets the speech acts. Principle two: [1] the construal generally has such an inductive process: behavior---traits, in order to obtain the connotation of the whole utterance. For example:"你真是世界末", the traits of世界末are enforced on"你".(Zou Chunling, 2010) [2] the farther the psychological distance, the easier the attribute representation realized at the higher level---conceptualization understanding.Principle three: Meaning construction could be comprehensively understood by virtue of culture differences.Besides, in the discussion, the two decisive factors are found. One is contextual factor; the other is individual's cognitive ability. In all, the use of indirect speech acts lies in its contextual meaning, which lays emphasis on what people mean in a particular context and how the context influences what is said rather than what those people say literally. The contextual factors includes subjective contextual factors (SCF) and objective contextual factors (OCF) which coordinate with each other to constrain the use of indirect speech acts. The two elements have been mentioned belong to individual's ability are intention and culture which still play an important role in inferencing process of meaning construction. This dissertation consists of six parts. Part one is the introduction of the whole dissertation which explains the basic properties of meaning constructions by means of cog-pragmatics, the cognitive mechanism of which is the image schema in metonymy. In addition, the purpose and the scope of this study are introduced to clarify necessity and feasibility of such a research. Part two surveys previous researches on image schema, meaning construction, metonymy, and indirect speech acts. While there are some insights to be gained for the present study from such approaches because of their advantages, we find that little attempts have been made to explore the issue of the cognitive mechanism of indirect speech acts. Thus, this aspect will become the main issues of the key research questions of my discussion. Part Three describes the theoretical background and discusses the building-up of the theoretical framework which will be adopted in the study. Part Four mainly discusses the results of this study with examples, with the aim of fully interpreting the operating process of meaning construction through image schema via metonymy. Part five is the further discussion of why and how the speaker can create the implicature of the explicit utterances and the reader/hearer can recover the implied meaning. Other pragmatic factors, which influence the meaning construction, are discussed. Part six is the conclusion of the whole dissertation.