A Metonymic Study On Indirect Request Speech Acts From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Speech act is always the centre of pragmatic researches. Since Searle's indirect speech act was published in 1975, it has aroused much attention. Traditional pragmatic theories like cooperative principles and politeness principles have achieved great success in the elaboration of indirect speech act and have great impacts on the latter studies.With the development of cognitive linguistics, people have noticed that researching simply within the field of pragmatics cannot yield a comprehensive explanation of language in daily use, especially the reason why people get the meaning of indirect request speech acts so fast and naturally. Combining Speech Act Metonymies with Action Scenario, Thornburg and Panther put forward to speech act scenario and explain the metonymic nature of indirect speech acts. Li Yongzhong in China has made a supplementary study by adding some pragmatic features; Wang Yin has proposed Event-domain Cognitive Model (ECM) with linear and level analysis, and static and dynamic scenario; Zhou and Bai analyzed indirect directives from the perspective of categorization and asserted that indirect directives form a prototypical category with fuzzy boundaries and the members in it differ in prototypical status.This thesis chose Conceptual Blending Theory proposed by Fauconnier in 1997 as a theoretical basis, together with the characteristics and pragmatic functions of conceptual metonymy and some typical examples. Conceptual Blending Theory, the development and enrichment of Mental Spaces, proposed that two or three mental spaces blend and yield novel meaning, namely emergent structure or emergent meaning, which is the intended meaning of indirect request speech acts. Besides, the connection between spaces coincides with the classification of conceptual metonymy, which tightens mappings cross spaces. As important as metaphor, metonymy is also a way of cognitive tool for knowing the world. Therefore, the interaction between Conceptual Blending Theory and Conceptual Metonymy can provide spatial mapping model for indirect request speech acts and prove that the intended meanings of indirect request speech acts in mapping are actually conceptual metonymy in natural, which reveals the iceberg of why people can get the meaning so fast. Furthermore, this model set up in the thesis could be applied in solving other pragmatic problems, such as discourse coherence, pragmatic misunderstanding, and conversation implicature and so on.