Analysis On Emotional Utterances In Excerpts From Xi Jinping’s Poverty Alleviation Speeches In Perspective Of Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics

Emotional utterances are utterances to express emotions.They play a basic meaning in the text as they exist in every discourse.The formation of emotional utterances originates from the generation of emotions.Emotion is a psychological feeling generated in the process of social interaction.Its essence is an abstract concept and its expression depends on language because language can express people’s psychological feelings.After emotions are expressed through language,they become emotional utterances.The research emphasis on emotional utterances lies in expressing attitude in discourse.Meanwhile,their characteristics changing with emotion classification are studied,also including features of metaphor,but cognitive research,especially in mechanisms is few.Their cognitive basis is not studied.Therefore,this study proposes three research questions:(1)What are the categories of emotional utterances and their distribution characteristics in Excerpts from Xi Jinping’s Poverty Alleviation Speeches?(2)What are the cognitive mechanisms of these utterances?(3)What is the cognitive basis for these utterances in the perspective of embodied-cognitive linguistics?To answer these questions,this study explores the emotional utterances in Excerpts from Xi Jinping’s Poverty Alleviation Speeches in a cognitive perspective using cognitive approaches of metaphor and metonymy and the idea of embodied-cognitive linguistics to analyze their cognitive mechanisms and cognitive basis.The findings are as follows:Firstly,this study finds six categories of emotional utterances in Excerpts from Xi Jinping’s Poverty Alleviation Speeches,including emotional utterances of happiness,emotional utterances of worry,emotional utterances of security,emotional utterances of expectation,emotional utterances of anger,and emotional utterances of sadness.Emotional utterances of security are the most abundant,because their frequencies are 91,accounting for 51.1%;the frequencies of emotional utterances of worry are 31,accounting for 17.4%;the frequencies of emotional utterances of happiness are 25,accounting for 14.1%;emotional utterances of expectation,anger,and sadness appear less frequently,11 times,16 times,and 4 times respectively,accounting for 6.2%,8.9%,and 2.3%.The modes of these emotional utterances expressing emotion are direct and indirect types,with 15 direct expressions and 163 indirect expressions.Secondly,the cognitive mechanisms of these emotional utterances are the metaphor mechanism,metonymy mechanism,metaphtonymy mechanism,and compound mechanism.Three types of metaphor mechanisms are used in Excerpts from Xi Jinping’s Poverty Alleviation Speeches,including the metaphor mechanism of spatial position,the metaphor mechanism of body parts,and the metaphor mechanism of physical feeling.Metonymy mechanism includes the metonymy mechanism of substituting effect with the cause and metonymy mechanism of substituting cause with the effect as well as metonymy mechanism with the help of cognitive reference point,prominence,and image schema.Metaphtonymy mechanism is the cause-effect metonymy mechanism that includes the metaphor mechanism of the organ "heart".The compound mechanism is an application of metaphor and conceptual integration and metonymy and its change lies in the change of the source domain of metaphor in the mechanism.The metonymy mechanism is involved in every category of emotional utterance.In contrast,the metonymy mechanism is more commonly used than a metaphor mechanism.Thirdly,humans get sensory feelings by interacting with objective reality,which is abstracted into emotional concepts and cognitive mechanisms under the influence of people’s cognitive ability.When expressing an emotional concept,people activate the memory of the corresponding emotional experience and cognitive mechanism to endow this emotion into the language to express,emotional utterances formed lastly.Therefore,the cognitive basis of emotional utterances is the process of people’s experience-sensory feeling-emotional concept-emotional utterances.This study enriches the cognitive research of emotional utterances.It provides a research direction for emotional utterances in a perspective of cognitive mechanisms,which reveals the link between emotion and emotional utterances.Meanwhile,it adds a case for the research of embodied-cognitive linguistics,hoping to help the further development of embodied-cognitive linguistics.