Cognitive Elements In Utterance Understanding

This paper makes a study of cognitive elements in utterance understanding from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, with the aim of supporting the contemporary cognitive theory of metaphor and applying it into foreign language teaching and learning. Traditionally, metaphor was viewed as a figure of speech and its study was confined mostly to literature and rhetoric, primarily decorative and ornamental in nature. According to George Lakoff, the founders of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is considered as a matter of thought; a way of cognition, and metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life and language. The view that metaphor plays a fundamental rhetorical effect is now generally accepted; more and more researchers have realized that language learning is closely related to the brain activities and internal processes. The cognitive metaphor theory brings a totally new research angle to foreign language teaching.In this paper a systematic analysis of cognitive linguistics and a large number of cognitive elements are investigated: firstly, this paper gives reviews of the theoretical background and scope of cognitive linguistics. And the conceptual metaphors and the cognitive mechanism of the metaphors are illustrated systematically, at the same time an analysis of the three basic cognitive elements in utterance understanding: the source domain, the target domain, the experiential basis, and the mapping are provided. At last, this paper emphasizes the importance of cognitive elements in EFL.In the first part , this paper overviews the cognitive linguistics, and illustrate the scope, assumption of the cognitive linguistics, especially the relationship between the embodied experience and linguistic meaning.In the second part, this paper overviews the development of the conceptual metaphor theory, from George Lakoff's conceptual metaphor to Falconer's conceptual blending, the paper demonstrates the nature, property and classification of conceptual metaphors as well as the two cognitive mechanisms of conceptual metaphor : mapping and integration.In the third part, it demonstrates three basic cognitive elements in utterance understanding: source domain, target domain and experiential basis. Among the three basic elements the experiential basis has been verified as the groundwork for the Lakoff's approach on metaphor and recently it has been developed as Embodiment Hypothesis. In the forth part, it illustrates the significance of the cognitive elements in EFL, and points out the primary importance of cognitive metaphor and cognitive elements in improving the pedagogy and students' learning capacity.In the last part, the author summarizes the key points of the paper: a broader discussion of the theoretical and practical significance of cognitive elements in utterance understanding, its possible contributions to the linguistic research and limitations. All in all, this paper has given a beginning effort in studying the cognitive elements in utterance understanding fromcognitive perspective. This paper tries to analyze the cognitive process of language learning so as to establish the metaphorical strategies for English learning: comprehension, retention, and autonomous and cooperative strategies. The introduction of metaphorical cognition to English language learning is to make the unconscious metaphorical process more noticeable so that it can promote foreign language teaching greatly.