A Study On Cognitive Mechanism Of Thieves' Cants From Oliver Twist Based On Lme Model

Cant,as a special language phenomenon,is used by a certain social group to protect its own interests and keep the in-group communication.For cant is not only a variation of the standard language but also a social dialect,it is related not only to people' s cognitive experience of the physical world but also the social factor that has a great influence on it.Thieves' cants,as a typical cant,mirror the behavior and thought of this social group,thus their production should be determined by the cants users' cognitive experience and the social factors.Taking this into account and starting from a perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics,we should analyze the cognitive mechanism of thieves' cants so as to give a reasonable explanation for how the meaning of these thieves' cants are produced.Oliver Twist is both a realistic novel written by Charles Dickens and a world classic in which a lot of thieves' cants are employed to depict Fagin and other villains,which exposes many social problems at that time.Although some scholars have studied the language expressions in this novel from the perspective of linguistics,most of them have discussed the conversational implicature and power discourse of it and few has systematically studied the thieves' cants in it.Based on the previous studies,this thesis does a research on the 72 items of thieves' cants collected from this novel and takes language contact,conceptual metaphor,conceptual metonymy and Event-domain Cognitive Model as the theoretical basis to build the LME model(L stands for language contact,M refers to conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy as well as E represents Event-domain Cognitive Model)from a perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics so as to analyze the cognitive and the social factors of their production and to expound on how the implied meanings of thieves' cants are related to their language expressions.The study classifies the collected data and finds that the 72 thieves' cants mainly consist of cants referring to people such as criminals,victims and thief-catchers,cants referring to objects like instruments used for crimes,places where criminals take their actions and stolen things and cants referring to actions including stealing,punishment and betraying,among which most of the thieves' cants are used to refer to objects and there are 32 items of thieves' cants of this type,accounting for 44% of the whole data.According to LME model,it is found that the 72 thieves' cants are mainly formed by the following four ways: cants by conceptual metaphor,cants by conceptual metonymy,cants by metaphor-metonymy and cants by language contact:(1)The thieves' cants are mainly produced by conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy and the majority of them are formed in a metonymic way,constituting 67% of the total data,which indicates the similarity and proximity between the implicit meaning of thieves' cants and their language expressions;(2)In terms of cants by language contact,they are mainly borrowed from French,German,Dutch,Norwegian and Romany,which manifests the important role the language contact,a social factor,plays in the production of thieves' cants.The study on the cognitive mechanism of thieves' cants from Oliver Twist aims to provide a new perspective for its language research and to enable more readers to know that Dickens adopts thieves' cants in his novel and makes them standardized and accepted by more people so as to promote the development of English.