Functions Of Point-of-view In Cognitive Poetics

Since 1970s, the theory of point-of-view has already gained great popularity and become one of the focused studies for many linguists. It is applied frequently with a broad coverage, such as stylistics, narratology, literary criticism, and functional semantics and so on. Originally, point-of-view is a term from literature as an approach to analyze literary works. Gradually, combining with linguistics, point-of-view obtains new vitality for further development. As for cognitive poetics, it is a new study combining literary study and linguistics, and the theoretical foundation resources are Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology, which adopts the theories from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology to analyze literature. In a word, cognitive poetics is a new embracing of linguistics and literature.According to Roger Fowler, point-of-view is classified into three types. Professor Xiong Muqing makes proper use of the conclusion from Roger Fowler and further improves its classification. He also redefines the concept of point-of-view in the angle of linguistics. On the basis of the studies both from Roger Fowler and Professor Xiong Muqing, this thesis aims to apply point-of-view into the analysis of cognitive poetics, in other words, to put it into some selected literary texts for further analysis. As a matter of fact, point-of-view itself exists in cognitive poetics, which is able to do great help for authors to comprehend and grasp the theme, characters and other points more profoundly. Therefore, point-of-view plays an indispensible role in cognitive poetics.There are five chapters in this thesis, with its main content as following:Chapter One focuses on a general introduction to this study, including motivation, purpose, research scope, the general description of methodology and layout.Chapter Two presents the literature review of the theory of point-of-view in and out of China, together with a brief introduction of cognitive poetics.Chapter Three lays out the theoretical framework. First, the relation between point-of-view and literature is illustrated, as well as the presentation of point-of-view in the main theories of cognitive linguistics, which can be fully proved that point-of-view and cognitive linguistics is closely related to each other.Chapter four gives out the detailed analysis and discussion of the functions of point-of-view in cognitive poetics. Virginia Woolf's masterpiece To the Lighthouse is selected for analyzing. In this part, the traditional analyzing way is compared with point-of-view, in order to find their similarities and differences. Thus, after a lot of comparing and studying, point-of-view is proved to be more effective than the traditional one.Chapter Five is the conclusion. This chapter mainly summarizes the previous analysis and the results of illustration, then, comes to the conclusion of the thesis. At the meanwhile, the limitations and suggestions of the thesis are also offered for further research.