The Analysis Of Aesthetics In English Rhetoric From The Cog-Pragmatic Perspective

Rhetoric could be taken as one of the most traditional disciplines in the academic field. It is Aristotle who divided the science into three parts:(1)Static branch: Mathematics, physics, and philosophy, these subjects are produced for the application of knowledge acquisition;(2)Dynamic branch:the practical science, such as politics and ethnics are developed for guiding the activities;(3) Static and Dynamic subjects:the creative science, such as:poetry, rhetoric which is produced for guiding the creative activities.Therefore, the rhetoric has close relationship with the creation activity, as well as the highest modality of human thoughts among science.It is Aristotle who initially put forward the conceptual word "rhetoric", which is commonly deemed as the counterpart of dialectic"(Aristotle,1354). The so-called dialectic is regarded as a sort of logical method of debating various issues of general interest, which permits scholars to make reasonable inference on different sides concerning a question, and thus assisted the exploration process of both language generation and construal, as well as the discovery of specific knowledge in a particular field. Rhetoric is similar to dialectic to some degree, including employing commonly held opinions as starting points for argument and in that they are universal, not limited to a specific class of question. Although the history of "rhetoric" is extremely long, it also has its own defects and limitations, among which scholars intend to discuss the word "rhetoric" on its decorative meaning construction, that is what people have got the word "rhetoric" as simile, metaphor, synecdoche, personification, euphemism as rhetorical means. Although no suspicion has been cast on the achievements of rhetoric study, the author purposefully focus on the study of aesthetics in rhetoric from Cog-pragmatic perspective under the framework of relevant rhetorical principles, aesthetic perception, Cognitive theories and pragmatic hypotheses, and this is supposed to be the motivation of this present research. The reason why this research attentively deals with such a subject is that such a Cog-pragmatic perspective is indispensible especially on the construal of aesthetic phenomena in people’s daily life, even in economic activities and political field.From the above arguments, the main objective of this research is to clarify how the aesthetic effects is acquired through Cog-pragmatic illustration, that is, The Cognitive and pragmatic factors extremely influential in generation and interpretation of aesthetics in English rhetoric are incorporated into this analysis in order to construe the underlying mechanisms of how aesthetic rhetoric achieve its way. By way of adjusting and blending other linguistic theories for reference, including the relevant Cognitive theory and pragmatic theory, in order to prove the rationality of this research topic---Cog-pragmatic study of rhetoric, to improve the feasibility of Cognitive pragmatic operation, with the purpose of analyzing the conventional rhetoric from a fresh perspective, which a highly-applicable and constrained inferential model. The significance of this research lies in that it is expected that not only can the explanatory power of this research be promoted in this pattern, but also the applicability should be extended into a larger area of linguistic phenomena owing to the proposed perspective.The dissertation consists of five chapters altogether. In chapter one, the research background introduction, the main objectives, the motivations are briefly introduced, including the simple explanation of the basic features and properties of rhetoric in conjunction with the rationale, data collection, research methods, etc. to disclose the feasibility and necessity available of such a breakthrough rhetoric-cog-pragmatic alignment research. In Chapter Two, the most relevant and important literature review concerning the previous studies of aesthetics in English rhetoric and the relevant cognitive&pragmatic study situation both home and abroad are sketched, containing the historical and academic background to the present study. In Chapter three, a set of postulates and the theoretical framework are proposed and introduced in order to form a relatively comprehensive whole. In Chapter four, the specific analyses of the aesthetics in English rhetoric from Cog-pragmatic perspective are formally presented In Chapter five, the conclusion, advantages and limitations are described as a cognitive pragmatic phenomenon, that is, this chapter aims to explicate findings, strengths and weaknesses, and suggestions for further studies etc.