The Directory Role Of Cognitive Context In Metaphor Understanding In A Framework Of The Relevance Theory

In verbal communication, metaphor can be used to convey communicative intentions indirectly. This research focuses its attention on metaphor or metaphorical expressions. As far as the cognitive function is concerned, metaphor, antonomasia and symbolism belong to the same cognitive process in which the image schematic structure in a conceptual domain is mapped onto another conceptual domain. In a word, they are used to perceive the target domain by means of the source domain. In this sense, the distinction of these three tropes does not matter much and all of them are the subjects to be discussed in this thesis.The traditional theories regard metaphor as the decoration of language and substitution or comparison of words. In the semantic approaches, metaphor is viewed as the interaction of two primary subjects and it is a process of creation of new meanings from this point of view. It is the pragmatic approaches that focus attention on the non-linguistic elements, such as the context in which the meaning of metaphor is created and understood. The cognitive approaches treat metaphor as the mapping between two conceptual domains, which indicates that it is a way to perceive the world. Though the above theories are not adequately integral in metaphor understanding mechanism, all of them are indispensable to studies on metaphor.In pragmatic approaches, Grice's Cooperative Principle views metaphor as violations of the maxims of quality and relation instead of presenting the nature of metaphor. In order to better show metaphor understanding process, this thesis will expound the issue on how to infer metaphorical meanings in the framework of the Relevance Theory in which the communication model involves ostensive and inferential processes. The latter process is to seek the optional relevance of the newly presented information to the old information or of utterances to contextual assumptions. Both the knowledge of utterances and the contextual assumptions involved in the inferential process are parts of one's cognitive context. In this sense, the cognitive context plays an important role in utterance understanding.In the traditional theories of context, it is all the contextual ingredients that form a certain context which is given before the communication. Therefore, it is a static view which can not describe the participants' mental activities. On the contrary, the view of the context in the Relevance Theory is different from that of traditional theories in that it is a dynamic one. The context is not given but varies in accordance with the communication. It is not limited to information about the immediate physical environment or the immediately preceding utterances. In addition, it involves the communicators' mental activities, such as beliefs, memories, as well as assumptions.Knowledge of contextual assumptions, contextual effects, the relevance, and contextual implications is conducive to the process of metaphor understanding. Metaphor can be classified in terms of its cognitive function, nature, etc. Since the norms of classification are various and no norm can include the others, this thesis discusses the directory role of the cognitive context in metaphor understanding in terms of three different linguistic levels at which metaphor may occur. As far as these three linguistic levels are concerned, metaphors can fall into word-source metaphors, sentence-source metaphors, and transcendent sentence-source metaphorical expressions. The understanding process of these metaphors is analyzed in a number of examples from two or more aspects in each level. Further, the importance of seeking for the optional relevance of the old information to the new information is stressed in metaphor comprehension.In linguistics, metaphor has bearing on lexical meaning changes, such as meaning shift. Based on this view, this thesis is in the hope of granting some hints to help students in reading comprehension.