Interpretation Of Negative Utterance From Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

This paper aims to analyze the negative utterances in an autobiographical book, Marva Collins’Way. From the cognitive linguistics perspective, this thesis is a qualitative case study of teacher’s speech act, based on cognitive integration theory. This research put an explanation of the positive concepts, and categorizes the conceptual structures. The discussion also devotes to in the influencing factors of the positive effect in negative utterance.The data analysis bases on the negator not and the contracted form n’t with the operator, namely, the auxiliary verbs and finite verbs, from the statistic the most frequent usage of negation is don’t. Taking the tense and the collocation of personal pronouns into consideration, the range of selecting sample is settled on I don’t and you don’t. Considering with the cognitive aspect, there are twenty seven samples involved in this research, including twenty unities of negative sentence and seven paragraphs of negative utterance. The former twenty unities are briefly analyzed in mental spaces, and the seven paragraphs are interpreted with important concepts in cognitive integration theory by diagrams in detail. Underling the conceptual integration theory, this paper focuses on compression and mapping two aspects, and it involves emergent structure, vital conceptual relations, cause and effect, decompression, megablend, analogical mapping, and imagination.The research illustrates the conceptual structures related with the positive emotion in diagram, and summarizes the negative forms related with the positive effect. From the result of this research, it is obvious that the teacher expresses her expectations on the students including the social expectation, the cultural expectation, and the ethnic expectation. The teacher raises the positive emotion in student with the strategic usage of negative utterance.This research will enrich the materials of case study from cognitive linguistics approach; and provides practical suggestion for teacher’s speech act. The textual material somehow relates to the positive psychology, and the negative utterance can be analyzes from other perspectives in future, such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, the evaluation system of teacher’s speech act, happiness and so on.