A Cognitive Approach To Indirect Request Speech Act

This thesis adopts a cognitive approach (prototypical) to analyze the indirect request speech act and interpret the fact that why hearers always arrived at intended meaning effortlessly.Traditional idiom theory does not seem to fully "disambiguate" the forces with which sentences are being used, in other words, to distinguish the literal force from the alleged idiomatic force, tough prosodic, and particularly intonational factors may clearly help; while inference theory offers a large body of fruitful ideas in acknowledging the role of extralinguistic and situational context in utterance interpretation. However, it does not satisfactorily account for the fact that people usually comprehend the indirect speech acts, especially the indirect request readily and naturally without any noticeable effort. Furthermore, it does not systematically specify the kinds of inference pattern that are needed for interpretation, or how the mechanism is called up.Then the thesis demonstrates that above deficiencies can be successfully overcome by the cognitive study in the framework of prototype theory under discussion. The conceptualization of various subjects in the world is through the mental activity of categorization, which is basic to our thought, perception, action, and speech. Without ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives. An understanding of how we categorize is central to any understanding of how we think and how we function, and therefore central to an understanding what makes up human.It is further presented that the study of indirect request speech act is best assumed to be within the framework of prototype theory. It is because there is an asymmetry in inner structure of a category that members within it share different status, some are in core, the others are in peripheral, thus different degrees of effort paid to inference process (metonymic link force and metonymic reasoning) varied, which facilitates the easy and effective performance of the such speech acts by the interlocutors who express their communication intensions via activating the whole category identified by the numbers of attributes possessed.The presented cognitive analysis of request supports the view that socioculturally conventional and institutional meanings are internalized in terms of speech as the symbolic representation of the physical, pre-conceptual experience of force and motions.Moreover, it is assumed that prototype theory, apart from accounting for indirect speech act, is also contribute to the study of other language phenomena such as discourse analysis, conversation analysis, literary critics and so on. Thus, investigating indirect speech acts from the cognitive point of view can further supplement and enrich the pragmatic theories and language research related.