A Study Of The Elliptical Discourse In The Light Of ICMs

As a general phenomenon of language,ellipsis is an effective way to avoid repetition and stress the main points of new information in discourse cohesion. Either A. Martinet's economy principle or Grice's cooperation principle, or Sperber and Welson's relevant theory, requires the expression to be simple and concise. In fact, ellipsis exists in both oral expression and literal expression, in other words, if there is a discourse, there must be ellipsis. Therefore, the successful understanding of ellipsis influences the understanding of the entire listening discourse directly. Ellipsis has different functions in different discourse, such as grammatical function, rhetorical function, cohesive function, etc. The study of ellipsis has a long history in the philosophy of language, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, rhetoric, psychology, etc. This essay focuses on the filling-up and reconstructing process of information to increase the chances of successful understanding and removing obstacles in communication.Being an important cohesion mechanism in discourse coherence, ellipsis was studied by scholars early. Though there is a long history of study of ellipsis, most of the explanations are viewed from the grammatical level, the pragmatically level or the semantic level. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, with the fast development of cognitive linguistics, people started to analyze ellipsis by applying cognitive linguistics, but it is not deep enough. This essay explores the whole understanding process of ellipsis in the listening discourse from the aspects of cognitive psyche and construction of ICMs. It represents the process of information analysis, information gap filling and information frame reconstruction. The combination of context and cognitive ability is the main reason of ellipsis, which is also an important factor in successful understanding process. The crux of ellipsis is what should appear in semantic is in fact omitted, but can be inferred from the context. As a new branch of linguistics, cognitive linguistics can explain some special linguistic phenomena from certain aspects, and explain the whole understanding process of ellipsis in listening discourse based on ICMs in cognitive linguistics and that must be completely new and special. Ellipsis is presupposition. The successful understanding of ellipsis in communication depends on the successful docking of background knowledge between the speaker and the hearer. Explaining the understanding process of ellipsis in listening discourse based on ICMs in cognitive linguistics helps a lot in analyzing the phenomenon in a penetrating way, as well as the filling-up of semantic blank of the received information, so as to understand the in-put information completely and communicate successfully. Besides, it can also provide some indication to the teaching of listening: if we pay attention to the ICMs and cognition process during teaching, it will smooth the understanding process and make communication easier, as well as perfect the teaching result.