Proximity: A Cognitive-pragmatic Approach To Oxymoron

Natural language can be considered as a psychological phenomenon. Cognitive linguists hold the view that language competence is a part of cognitive ability and that the application of language embodies cognitive ability. Figurative language, as a part of natural language, has an immediate effect on the way how we look at the world just as literal language does. Among figurative language, oxymoron is one special collocation. It originated from the ancient Greek word"oxumoron", which means a juxtaposition of two words contradictory to each other in meaning. Yet this seemingly self-contradictory and illogical term can evoke people to reflect on its implications, so as to achieve peculiar aesthetic effects. Therefore, oxymoron has attracted the attention of psychologists, rhetoricians and linguists owing to its novelty and particularity. However, the study on oxymoron so far has limited itself to the aspects of its structural features, social functions and translating methods. Few of the study have been carried out to explore its meaning construction and the great influence that human cognitive ability exerts upon it.The semantic anomaly found in the use of oxymoron is not only the product of pragmatic phenomenon, but also the outcome of human cognitive process. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation is to study oxymoron from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective with the focus on the production mechanism of oxymoron under Autonomy-dependence Analysis Framework in light of Mental Model-based Pragmatic Reasoning Theory.In the production of oxymoron, the utterance is geared by the speaker's intention, which serves as the autonomy and gives derivation to the dependence which is converted as the utterance. The derivation, constrained by context and the speaker's intentional attitude, is realized through making use of stereotypical relation, specifically proximity. The derivation goes through two stages. First, the two word meanings in the collocation are respectively contiguous to the speaker's intentional contents despite the fact that the two words themselves are contradictory to each other. Second, these two contradictory words, by means of the choice of proper values in their own established meaning continuums, are finally interrelated through the Law of Transitivity. And we can call this relation as"opposite directional proximity relation". Thus, with the help of proximity, an expression of oxymoron, namely the dependence is derived from the autonomy. Once the dependence is fixed, it will inherit some properties and functions of the autonomy, and the seemingly inappropriate phrase becomes recognizable and comprehensible under the influence of the autonomy. This process is called"nipping-along"of the dependence to the autonomy, the mechanism of derivation.Oxymoron, as one speech activity, is evidently interacting with human's cognitive methods and cognitive strategies, thus in turn pointing to the underlying cognitive mechanism behind the speech activities.