A Cognitive Study On English Tag Question

This thesis relies on the theory of Categorization in cognitive linguistics to present a bold attempt to apply the theory to English tag question so as to prove that it is practical to study various construction expressions of tag question and its polysemous property in light of cognitive linguistics.A tag question is a special construction in English. It is a statement or a host sentence followed by a mini-question or an interrogative fragment. Syntactically, tag question appears to be an interrogative sentence. However, the tag question functions more than just a clause expecting the hearers'opinion on the stated matter, but do various'acts'and express speakers'intentions. It also has some major functions as indicating inference, seeking agreement, inviting confirmation, expressing doubt, expressing interest and expressing humor or sarcasm, etc..Among the various linguistic phenomena of English, tag question has always been the subject of interest of many linguists, who classified and examined tag question from different perspectives, including its grammatical rules, its pragmatic functions and its prosody and so on. The traditional approaches emphasize the internal structure of linguistics by deriving the different senses of a linguistic form through the context. They isolate language from the external world, such as, human experience and cognitive devices and regard polysemy as a linguistic coincidence; therefore, the traditional approaches lack strength and conviction, and cannot give a full and rich explanation to the various construction expressions and the polysemous phenomenon of tag question.Cognitive linguists, on the other hand, believe that the structure of language is a direct reflection of human cognitive processes and argue that language is the result of cognition. From the perspective of cognition, categorization is the base of the cognitive process because"Categorization refers to the fact that human beings can identify the similarities between a variety of different phenomena, classifying them and then attributing appropriate class names to them."(Qian Guanlian, 2001:10). Categorization is, in principle, the mental process of classifying the objects, the mechanisms, the actions and events, and naming them properly. Tag question, as one of the most common forms of linguistic phenomenon, has something to do with human cognition and is unexceptionally product of cognition. As a multidisciplinary product, cognitive linguistics, while the other approaches have all been reduced to failure in providing an overall interpretation of tag question, is adopted in this study to shed new light on the understanding of this issue. This paper relies on the theory of categorization in cognitive linguistics to present a bold attempt to apply the theory to English tag question so as to prove that it is practical to study various construction expressions of tag question and its polysemous property in light of cognitive linguistics. According to the axes of categorization initiated by Rosch, the yes/no question instantiates the prototypical effect of tag question and the process of metaphor facilitate the polysemous understanding of tag question.