A Study On Matrix Domain Operation Of Metonymy In Indirect Refusal Speech Acts In Modern Chinese

Ever since the emergence of speech act theory, significant attention has been paid to the study of refusal speech act, which hitherto has a history over20years. As a language phenomenon frequently occurring in daily communication, refusal speech act is normally defined as the "non-cooperative" option which is directed at the interlocutors’requests, suggestions, invitations and offers, and in order to save the hearers’face, speakers usually adopt indirect refusal strategies to maintain the harmonious relationship between them. Scholars both at home and abroad have emphatically investigated pragmatic strategies of refusal speech acts and conducted cross-cultural studies on refusal strategies.Panther and Thornburg (1998) claim that these traditional pragmatic inference theories do not provide a satisfactory explanation of the fact that hearers in a conversation usually could make inferences to acquire the intended meaning conveyed by speakers very quickly and effortlessly; and these theories cannot give a systematic account of the specific inference patterns and the cognitive process that are involved in the interpretation of indirect speech acts. In recent years, studies on the politeness of indirect refusal speech acts, on the relationship between prototype theory and indirect refusal speech acts, and on the psychological adaptation of indirect refusal speech acts have been conducted, but few have touched upon the cognitive mechanism of indirect refusal speech acts.With the development of cognitive linguistics, more and more cognitive linguists suggest that indirect speech acts should be explained from a cognitive perspective and some (such as Panther&Thornburg,1997; Mendoza&Otal,2002, etc.) hold that there exists metonymic thinking both in the production and comprehension of indirect speech acts. However, the metonymic interpretation of indirect speech acts mainly focuses on directives, commissives, and expressives, a deep insight into indirect refusal speech acts is countable. Moreover, these studies are mainly conducted to demonstrate that the meaning attaining of indirect speech acts could be explained by metonymy, but fail to probe into the specific situation of metonymic operations in indirect speech acts.This present thesis, based on Panther and Thornburg’s action scenario theory and Mendoza and Otal’s matrix domain view, endeavors to account for the metonymic thinking that exists in indirect refusal speech acts and attempts to explore the specific situation of metonymic operations in indirect refusal speech acts in modern Chinese. The present research will be carried out by analyzing a set of dialogues in Chinese modern dramas and is expected to achieve such conclusions as:1) metonymy in indirect refusal speech acts in modern Chinese usually reflects a matrix domain operation, which normally has multiple formations;2) context occupies a pivotal position in confirming whether a speech act is indirect or not and also in affecting the target domain of an indirect refusal speech act metonymy;3) the metonymic operation is in essence guided and controlled by cognitive background knowledge, immediate context and personal pragmatic parameters;4) two kinds of metonymy chains usually can be found in multi-turn indirect refusals from indirect to direct or vice versa.