Understanding Dislocations In English: A Cognitive Perspective

Dislocations are a kind of syntactical forms or grammatical methods. The traditional researches of dislocations in English focus on internal factors. Even though people take external factors into account, they do not value the functions of human cognition restraining dislocations. Emerging in the end of the eighties of the twentieth century, cognitive linguistics is an approach to language formed in the process of the objection against the mainstream generative approach. The thesis borrows the theories of cognitive linguistics to elaborate the cognitive ideology of dislocations in English.The thesis introduces the two kinds of dislocations in English in detail: left dislocations and right dislocations, which are regarded as the principles of the internal change of language. However, cognitive linguistics analyzes dislocations in the perspective of participants' subjectivity. The thesis assorts to the theories of iconicity, figure and ground, and imagery to research the cognitive ideology under the surface structures of left dislocations. In addition, the theories also prove that the cognitive iconicity exists between left dislocated structures and human cognition. These structures still reflect the figure-ground model of cognitive and the cognitive imagery of left...