Speech Act Metonymy And Pragmatic Analysis

For a long time, metonymy is a rhetorical device as it is a substitution between words. Since 1980s, due to the development of cognitive linguistics, metonymy is considered as a way to think and understand the world. In 1997, Thornburg & Panther applied the theories of scenario and metonymy to do some research on indirect speech act, which provides a new perspective for metonymy and speech act theory. They assert that one phase of a speech act scenario can metonymically stand for the whole scenario or another phase of the scenario. In this way, metonymy is not limited to the relationship between words any more; however, it is lifted to the levels of sentence and discourse, which further proves that metonymy, as a means of understanding the objective world, exists in the cognitive system of human beings. Based on Thornburg & Panther's speech act metonymy, this thesis analyzes the degrees of politeness of different types of speech act metonymy, sums up the inferencing patterns of request speech acts and commissive speech acts and applies the inferencing patterns to interpret misunderstanding in language communication.