A Cognitive Approach To The Generation Mechanism Of Zeugma

Zeugma originated from Greek, meaning “join” and “yoke” is a figure of speech which is mainly used in literature works. As a rhetorical device, its particular word collocation and its aesthetic effect always attract the attention of litterateurs and scholars home and abroad. Traditional studies focus on abundant description and analysis of its definition, classification, aesthetic function, translation skill, etc. In recent years, contemporary linguists like semantists, pragmatists and cognitive linguists probe into the old issue by proposing different linguistic approaches, which lay a solid foundation for future studies of zeugma. However, the study from cognitive study is limited and even no one studies it from perspective of philosophy of mind. Therefore, it is imperative to explore the generation mechanism of zeugma tentatively from perspective of philosophy of mind.Philosophy of mind, a philosophical thinking concerning the relation between body and mind, has same origin with Philosophy of language. However, different from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind takes language activities as the reflection of mental activities and probe into the calculation and representation of mind through language activities. In return, the working features, working mechanism and rules of the mind can be applied in the linguistic research, for the use of language is certainly concerned with some factors related to human, such as subjective experience, embodiment, consciousness, and emotion, etc, all of which can be finally solved from body-mind relation. Accordingly, adopting the positive gains of current linguistic study against the background of philosophy of mind proposed by Xu Shenghuan, the paper attempts to construct tentatively a new theoretical framework with the diagram of zeugmatic generation process to analyze the generation mechanism of metaphorical and metonymical zeugma respectively.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction of this paper, including motivation, objectives, methodology and data collection, and layout of study. Chapter Two is literature review, revisiting the previous studies on zeugma from different perspectives, and points out the defects of those researches. Chapter Three sets up theoretical framework by borrowing some language-related concepts of philosophy of mind. In this chapter, we firstly give a brief introduction to philosophy of mind as well as its relation with linguistic studies, and then construct a unified theoretical framework. Chapter four is the application of the new model, whose feasibility and validity can be testified through analysis of metaphorical and metonymical zeugma. Chapter five serves as the conclusion of this study, including summery, major findings, implications, limitation and suggestions.The main findings of the study can be summarized in the following way:Intentionality is the initial step of the generation process of zeugma, determining the producer’s choice of the potential content and attitude when he speaks. Objects and events described by zeugma are composed of a physical properties and mental properties, which are supervened from physical events but also dependent on the speaker’s free will. It is the mental property that determines the way of expression. Above all, the mental imagery simulated by some physical properties can emerge into the reflective consciousness experience through association and imagination based on gestalt transformation and the reflective consciousness experience is transcribed by language symbols, which is the generation process of zeugma.