A Metonymic Study On Indirect Directive Speech Acts From The Perspective Of Event-domain Cognitive Model

Indirect Speech Acts, which is an ordinary phenomenon in our daily lives, has been a hotissue since Searle’s Indirect Speech Act Theory. More and more scholars begin to analyze thisphenomenon from the perspective of cognition in recent years.Metonymy, like metaphor, is a kind of cognitive mechanism. In essence, metonymy is ameans of cognition, which plays an important role in human inference process. Therefore, wecan’t analyze indirect speech acts without considering metonymy. The Speech Act MetonymyTheory, which is proposed by Thornburg and Panther, regards a speech act as an ActionScenario which consists of several components. Actually their theory accounts for themetonymic nature of indirect speech acts, and provides a theoretical basis for the metonymicstudy on indirect speech acts. Hernández and Ruiz de Mendoza argue that the generation andinterpretation of utterances must involve some pragmatic parameters, such as cost-benefit,optionality and power. They improve Thornburg and Panther’s scenarios with the abovepragmatic parameters. Unsatisfied with the previous theoretical models which are single-leveloriented, dynamic-scenario oriented and syntactic-constructions oriented, Wang Yinintroduces the Event-domain Cognitive Model, or ECM to overcome the above inadequacies.The ECM, which accords with human normal cognitive rules, accounts for not only theconceptual structures and syntactic constructions but also phenomena in semantic andcommunicative aspects. It can also provide a clear explanation for cognitive mechanism ofindirect speech acts.The indirect directive speech acts has always been a hot issue in the theory of indirectspeech act. Although Wang Yin proposes that the ECM can be used to illustrate thephenomena of indirect directives, he doesn’t provide us a detailed description of operationmechanism of it. This thesis chooses Wang Yin’s Event-domain Cognitive Model as itstheoretical basis, together with Thornburg and Panther’s Speech Act Metonymy Theory, inorder to construct a Event-domain Cognitive Model of Directive Speech Acts, and to illustratehow people generate and interpret the indirect directive speech acts within the framework ofECM. This thesis also discusses and analyzes the metonymic strength of different componentsof ECM, and the pragmatic parameter involves in directives. At last, the thesis distinguishesdifferent subtypes of directives, such as request, order and advising, by comparing theirpragmatics parameters. According to our analysis, we can conclude that ECM can provide aclear and comprehensible model of metonymy for indirect directive speech acts. It revealswhy people can understand indirect speech acts and the implicit meaning in utterance fast andeffortlessly. Consequently, it can be proved that metonymy is the underlying mechanism of the generation and interpretation of human utterance, and the indirect directive speech acts aremetonymic in nature.