A Cognitive Study Of Unusual Collocations In Journalistic English

Unusual collocations, which result from the anomalous application of language in a specific context for rhetoric or pragmatic purposes, are one of the reflections of artistry of language and can bring to people a mint-fresh perspective of the objective world. Traditionally, researchers interpret unusual collocations in English literary works at rhetoric, semantic or pragmatic level.As a new approach, cognitive linguistics 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 with a new angle for reviewing and understanding language. The present paper is devoted to the study of unusual collocations in journalistic English from a cognitive perspective within the theoretical framework of Figure-Ground relation in cognitive linguistics.In this paper, unusual collocations are believed to bring prominence and variation by means of unusual semantic relationships or semantic clashes of collocating items. Two types of unusual collocations are described in terms of semantic relationships: unusual collocations overlapping with figures of speech and collocations with unfavorable semantic prosody. On the basis of studies on Figure-Ground relation in cognitive linguistics, this paper puts forth the specific conceptions of figure and ground in unusual collocations and makes a tentative analysis accordingly.The conclusion of this paper is as follows:First, Figure-Ground theory is a new and effective way to interpret unusual collocations in English from a cognitive perspective.Second, unusual collocations are used for attracting the reader's attention to the marked figures. As a kind of language creation, they are believed to be endowed with intensified communicative effects in journalistic English.Third, unusual collocations can make the meanings of lexical units rich and profound and thus play an important role in the development of human language.Fourth, unusual collocations correlate with people's cognitive features and conform to their cognitive laws.