Indirect Speech Acts: A Study From The Perspective Of Metonymy

As an important language phenomenon, indirect speech acts have attracted a great deal of attention in the research of pragmatics. Traditional theoretical studies fail to provide a satisfactory interpretation of indirect speech acts though they have made great progress and brought about great influence on language research. This study adopts a metonymic approach to the analysis and interpretation of indirect speech acts.The theory of Indirect Speech Acts Metonymy maintains that, in indirect speech acts, people can perform a speech act (such as promises, offers, requests, suggestions and so on) by mentioning an attribute of that speech act, that is to say, do things metonymically. The mechanism goes in this way: metonymy is a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same idealized cognitive model (ICM) (Radden & Kovecses, 1999). It is a mapping within one model, One category within a model is taken as standing for another category within the same model. So the main function of metonymy is to use one category to activate another within the same model. Accordingly, in indirect speech acts, one explicit concept can have its implications. By uttering the speech, speakers express their implication, then perform this speech act indirectly. According to Action Scenario, in indirect speech act, a speaker can stand for or activate part of or whole scenario by mentioning part of the action scenarios, that is, to perform the speech act metonymically. There are metonymic links between components of speech act scenario and the whole scenario or its CORE, thus by focusing on the specific components of the scenario, indirect utterances somehow seem to be capable of evoking the whole of it and are usually understood as their intended meanings. This thesis studies indirect speech acts from the perspective of metonymy. With the help of Action Scenario and other metonymy theories and on the basis of analyzing Directive, Commissive and Expressive Speech Act Scenarios, this thesis studies the scenarios for Assertives and Declarations Speech Acts tentatively.Cognitive scholars have always neglected the applications of indirect speech act metonymies. Most of them focus their attention on its typology and functions. As it is generally accepted that indirect speech act metonymy is an important language phenomenon, we have every reason to apply it into other fields and we can claim that it will be a great attraction in future research. The metonymic analysis of indirect speech acts in this study indicates that metonymic relationships and reasoning also contribute to the study of other language research such as stylistic analysis, rhetorical analysis and even language teaching. Thus the investigation into indirect speech acts from the perspective of metonymy helps to further supplement and enrich pragmatic theories and related language research, which sheds insightful light on language teaching.