A Study On Animal Words From Illocutionary And Cognitive Perspectives

This dissertation starts with a literature review. Then, it studies the functions of animal words from three aspects: application in scientific field, totem of minority nationality and features of national culture. Alter probing into the illocutionary forces of animal words, the dissertation ends with the cognitive analysis of animal words.A relevant literature review shows that the related studies made on animal words have been confined to scopes of Contrastive Linguistics and translation in Pragmatics. Many researches into animal words merely dwell on cultural connotations of animal words in the field of cross-eultural communication.The originalities of this dissertation lie in the exploration of animal words from the angles of the illocutionary force and the cognitive concern in linguistics. The dissertation holds that animal metaphors embody illocutionary forces as well as its linguistic vagueness. When indirect speech act is employed to retted communication intention, metaphorical sentences with animal words create stronger illocutionary forces in communication. Owing to different "goals" in communication, an indirect speech act could produce a linear indirect illocutionary act and a lateral indirect illocutionary act respectively.It is pointed out in the dissertation that human cognitive-semantic concern of animal words reflects the linguistic universality, human prominence view, atlentional view and anthropocentricism.The pattern of human basic cognition of animal words in linguistics reflects people's cognitive views and the role of human gene. The arrangement of animal words in the syntactical structure represents the prominence view of cognitive linguists. Because of different perspectives, an animal word, whether it is the salience of a sentence or not. results in a different image in diiferent syntactical structures. According to the attentional view, animal metaphors are from people's focus on animals' characteristics, thus enriching human language. Since language is a physiological mechanism controlled by gene and there is an inseparable relation between language and thought cognition, human beings develop the common cognition of animals' characteristics. In this sense, human gene becomes the source oftheir cognition of animal words.As the cognitive-semanlic conception of an animal word is mainly attained through the so-called "covert category", the biological opposition is realized by covert categories of animal words in terms of meaning, coexisting and source. Since the opposition between conceptions about mankind and animals universally exists, the universality of linguistic opposition of animal words shows its "sirong universals" and "weak universals" respectively within some domains. The basic universality of cognitive-semantic conceptions of animal words reflects anthropocentricism through the following two aspects: First, degradation will happen when an animal word is correlatively applied to a person; second, animal words are never mentioned along with mankind on the same base.This dissertation is only an attempt to break through the limitations of the present studies on animal words, and it is hoped that this study will shed some light on further researches into the use of animal words.