A Cognitive Approach To Pragmatic Inference

Pragmatic inference plays an important role in human communication. Researchers from different fields have adopted different approaches to study inference. Some of the theories that are always used by linguists are speech-act theory, Gricean principles, and Sperber and Willson's Relevance Theory. Most of the discourse analysts assume that the identification of the speaker's communicative intention requires some inferential work on the part of the hearer. The explanation provided by those analysts is a necessary part of the theory of utterance meaning, but it still has two shortcomings:The first is that it does not satisfactorily account for the fact that the hearer can infer the speaker's intentions without any noticeable effort;The second is that it does not offer a systematic account of the nature of the inference patterns themselves and their cognitive grounding.The present thesis attempts to find out how the hearer can understand the speaker's intentions without any noticeable effort. In this paper, we will analyze pragmatic inference under the framework of cognitive linguistics, and we will talk about cognitive linguistics' notion of scenario and speech act metonymy. We will try to demonstrate that speech act scenario and specch act metonymy theory are very helpful in understanding the utterance meaning. And we will use more linguistic examples, including both Chinese and English discourses, to demonstrate that metonymy contributes a lot to a better understanding of how conversation works.The thesis consists of fore parts:Chapter 1 briefly introduces this thesis by focusing on the theoretical framework, research objectives, the reasons why the present topic has been chosen and the organization of this thesis.Chapter 2 mainly focuses on pragmatic inference. It compares general features of logic inference with those of pragmatic inference, and pragmatic inference's three defining characteristics are mentioned here. Besides, two influential approaches that have been adopted to the study of pragmatic inference are illustrated here, that is,...