Linguistic Form And Cognition: A Relevance-Theoretic Interpretation Of The Style Of English Parallelism

This thesis aims to expound the cognitive basis of linguistic form through a relevance-theoretic interpretation of the style of English Parallelism, with an attempt to explore the correlation between linguistic form and cognition.After a careful analysis of English Parallelism, we find the cognitive basis underlying the linguist form of English Parallelism. As such, we employ Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory to make a detailed interpretation of the style of English Parallelism through a cognitive point of view. All these efforts are devoted to a greater attempt: to explore the correlation between linguistic form and cognition.We first make a general introduction of the key notions of relevance theory, in particular the relevance-theoretic view on style and rhetoric, and we use these theories to explain to full extent the cognitive basis of English Parallelism. The relevance-theoretic view on style boils down to the following: style is the relationship; style arises in the pursuit of relevance; poetic effects result from the accessing of a large array of very weak implicatures in the otherwise ordinary pursuit of relevance. By employing these theories, together with the relevance-theoretic view on rhetoric, which claims that "consistency with the principle of relevance" is the only principle in the comprehension procedure, we then expound in great detail the strong style of English Parallelism, with focus on the definition of relevance. These ideas are further supported by our careful illustration of its stylistic use in pubic speaking and advertising. All these interpretations prove that linguistic form is based on cognition, which is governed by the search for relevance. On this basis, we further conclude: different linguistic forms can produce relevance of differing degrees regardless of the same prepositional forms; choosing efficient linguistic forms can facilitate the search for relevance and thus greater contextual effects are achieved; instead of interpreting linguistic form in rigid formal features, we shall try to expose to the fullest extent the cognitive basis of linguistic form.In brief, relevance theory can interpret quite convincingly the style of linguistic form through the perspective of cognition, and thus provides a very good framework for better exploring the correlation between linguistic form and cognition.