Cognitive And Pragmatic Analysis Of Metalinguistic Negation

Metalinguistic negation is a kind of special and common language phenomena,and it's popular in the internet,for example,the one like "not...but..." Moreover,it is a common phenomenon in most kinds of language.Previous studies on metalinguistic negation have been conducted mainly from the perspective of semantic,and most of them concentrated on its form.Scholars have tried to explain what metalinguistic negation is and what its pragmatic function is.Or they have tried to express the feature of the negation operator and the negation scope.However,most of the studies have neglected of one crucial factor—the function and influence of communicators.This thesis attempts to analyze metalinguistic negation from the cognitive aspects.First of all,based on the figure and ground theory,this thesis has endeavored in explaining the feature of metalinguistic negation.In fact,the process of metalinguistic negation when it is processing,a kind of transformation between figure and ground realized.This amounts to say,there is a kind of relation between figure and ground in metalinguistic negation,and in the whole communication process,transformation between its figure and ground achieved,which should be distinguished from traditional descriptive negation.Apart from the framework of figure and ground theory,this thesis has also analyzed metalinguistic negation under the framework the relevance theory,so that a relatively deep understanding about the decoding mechanism of metalinguistic negation will be obtained.Relevance theory takes language communication as an ostensive-inferential process,and what's more,it has taken communicators' cognitive environment into consideration,which is different from the traditional context,and including physical environment,language information,encyclopedia knowledge,etc.Speaker gives an ostensive stimulus,or informative intension,which should be relevant to hearer's cognitive environment,and then a series of context assumptions,will be constructed.Accordingly,hearer adapts their cognitive environment,so that he can get the communicative intension,that is to say,according context effect and speakers' goal can be achieved.This thesis has been developed as the following way:Chapter one is a brief introduction of metalinguistic negation,and information about the content of this thesis,significance of this thesis,etc.;Chapter two is literature review.It has given a brief explanation about the study on metalinguistic negation home and abroad;Chapter three is the theoretical work,which gives an illustration of the two major theories:the figure and ground theory and relevance theory;Chapter four analyzes metalinguistic negation from the perspective of cognition,which explain the feature and decoding mechanism of metalinguistic negation;Chapter five is the conclusion.As a special and significant language phenomenon,this thesis has tried to explain the feature and decoding mechanism of metalinguistic negation,so that it can be widely used in our daily communication.