An Empirical Study Of Pragmatic Implicature Teaching Of Body-part Words Based On Iconicity Theory

Many studies on body-part word can be found,but most of these studies concentrate on the theoretical research mainly covering metaphorical study,metonymical study,and semantic extension study on some common body-part words such as eye,hand,and heart.There are few researches concerning to the pragmatic empirical teaching.On the one hand,it results from the complexity and long-time consumption of carrying out the empirical teaching study;on the other hand,the research model,theoretical research with some teaching discussion,is more favored by most researchers.Considering the limit of body-part words and the elaboration of previous theoretical researches on them,the researcher makes a bold trial,based on an authentic empirical teaching research in the class,and the study is carried out with the goals of improving medium–to-high skills of English learners' language input and output.In addition,it aims to make up the gap of shortage of empirical studies and convincingly show the feasibility and credibility of empirical study on body-part words with quantitative statistics.Iconicity,one of the most important theories in cognitive linguistics,means there is similar mapping relationship between the “form” and “meaning”.This similar mapping relationship is what is called language motivation in its linguistic term.For example,the markedness of the marked iconicity has a strong persuasion in expressing and understanding the extra meaning of the expressions.Its extra meaning is somehow similar to pragmatic implicature.Based on it,an empirical study of the pragmatic implicature teaching on body-part words is developed.Firstly,by exploring language motivation as teaching method,the question how foreign language learners better master the implied meanings of body-part words and therefore improve their language study is raised.In addition,a further research about what effect of language motivation has on every single body-part words,phrase,sentence,and idioms acquisition is also covered on the basis of the first question.For an assurance of valid and creditable experimental results,the researcher randomly chooses students in two classes from a rural senior high school as subjects with one class is 42,acting as the experiment group,the other group is 40,which is the control group.The two groups are designed to finish the same pre-study assessment report,test paper,and relevant questionnaires to collect quantitative and qualitative data and the results are as follows:(1)After three weeks of teaching practice,the result show that students from experiment group have a better mastery of implied meanings of body-part words through language motivation instruction which benefits their language acquisition on aggregation than the control group.(2)The test results show there are no apparent differences between experiment group and control group in acquiring the single body-part words and common phrases,but for the idiom and sentence containing body-part words,two groups performs differently---the acquisition of experimental group is far better than the control group.(3)Through analyzing the test results of experiment group and the questionnaires,a new finding that some language expressions containing body-part words such as face,mouth,eye,ear and hand are more easily to be acquired than those containing nose,tongue and foot is observed.At last,as the supplementary means,the qualitative analysis of questionnaires reveals that learners in the experiment group speak highly of their English teacher.They hold the view that the improvement of their pragmatic language study results from teacher's special teaching methods and relevant teaching activities,which give them a new way to learn English and make them to re-think their English study.At the end of the research,the researcher puts forward some specific directions toward pragmatic implicature teaching for the current English teaching,at the same time;the researcher also looks back on the drawbacks and limitations in the thesis,and then gives some personal suggestions or wishes to the future relevant researches.