Iconicity And Figure-Ground Account Of Dislocation Construction

Dislocations are a special kind of syntactical forms which include two types:left dislocation and right dislocation.Biber(2000:956) provides that in English,a dislocated construction is a marked case in which its syntactical feature is that there is a committed noun phrase which is located at the beginning and the end of a sentence,and a co-index pronoun emerges in a corresponding place of this sentence.Therefore,dislocation is a marked construction.In this paper,the author points out some disadvantages of existing approaches after a brief literature review of dislocated constructions:the previous studies just focused on the internal change of language structures without the consideration of extralinguistic factors,especially cognitive factors when considering subjectivity. Consequently,this restrictive investigation only in a linguistic domain cannot extend to the non-linguistic domain.This is the reason why dislocation is examined in the present study in the light of cognitive perspectives.Cognitive linguistics,as a new approach,is the study of language based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it and the study of the human language with consciousness knowledge(Ungerer & Schmid,1996),which provides us a new model to review and understand language.Here,this paper attempts to explore the dislocations in English by means of the theories of cognitive linguistics to prove the involvement of the participants' cognitive factors when construing them.With the application of the theories of iconicity,figure and ground,and reference point,this thesis proves that cognitive iconicity exists between left dislocated constructions and human cognition.In all,the study of dislocations in English by employing cognitive approaches is a great enrichment to cognitive linguistics which holds that language is not autonomous but the product of cognitive mechanism.The conclusion of this thesis is the following four points:First,figure-ground theory,from the perspective of people's cognition,is a new and effective way to interpret the traditional linguistic phenomena.Second,dislocation,as one marked syntactic structure,is a marked instantiation of figure-ground theory in linguistic phenomena.Third,dislocation is a cognitive mechanism for directing the hearer's focus attention on the marked figure.And last,dislocation is not against but for people's cognitive features and laws.