A Study On The Construal Mechanism Of Mock Politeness From The Perspective Of Event Cognition

Studies on verbal(im)politeness have a long history abroad and at home.Scholars have founded some mature theoretical frameworks and harvested lots of research findings.Most of these studies are focused on either linguistic politeness or linguistic impoliteness.However,there is a continuum between linguistic politeness and linguistic impoliteness,and mock politeness is a linguistic phenomenon in this continuum.Mock politeness is a common phenomenon in our linguistic interaction,but scholars pay little attention to this phenomenon.As a result,systematic studies on mock politeness are quite rare.Among current studies on mock politeness,scholars mainly explore the pragmatic strategies,functions,pragmatic effects,etc.,from the perspective of sociopragmatics.Studies on the construal mechanism of mock politeness are seldom.The author of this thesis tries to analyze the construal mechanism of mock politeness from where listeners stand under the guidance of PP and EST of event cognition.From the cognitive operations of EST,we can see that people are inclined to segment events and make prediction about what will happen in order to keep up with event changes during language comprehension.When prediction error occurs,the error monitoring system in one's mind can detects them by comparing predictions with representations in current sensory and perceptual information.Then the error signal is broadcast through one's brain,and this lead the working models to destabilize and open their input units.Based on the current sensory and perceptual information,the working models are reset to represent new event information.The corpus of this thesis is collected from the famous TV series Empresses in the Palace and a classification of it is given.Based on the realizing methods,mock politeness is categorized into “iron fist in a velvet glove”,“token empathy”and “allusion”.What follows is analysis of the construal mechanism of mock politeness.The main findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)mock politeness is socomplex because it follows some maxim(s)while flouts other maxim(s);(2)speakers in mock politeness usually shift current event by changing time,spatial-temporal framework,or introducing new entities to achieve their communicative goals;(3)when such changes happen,prediction error in listeners' mind is detected which prompts listeners to update their working models and build a new one.This thesis holds that listeners construe the speech acts of mock politeness when they update their working models and create new ones.