A Cognitive Approach To Indirect Speech Acts

This thesis adopts a cognitive approach to analyze and interpret the indirect speech acts, the language phenomenon that always attracts a lot of attention in the research of pragmatics.Traditional inference theory offers a large body of fruitful ideas in acknowledging the role of the extralinguistic and situational context in utterance interpretation. However, it does not satisfactorily account for the fact that people usually comprehend the indirect speech acts, in particular the conventional ones, readily and naturally without any noticeable effort. Furthermore, it does not systematically specify the kinds of inference patterns that are needed for interpretation of indirect speech acts, or how the mechanism involved is called up.Then the thesis demonstrates that above deficiencies can be successfully overcome by the cognitive study under-discussion. The conceptualization of speech acts is reflected in the idealized cognitive model and a set of metaphors linking the physical action domain with the language domain in terms of the concept of. force. This framework of speech acts comprises the speech act scenario which is just the result of abstracting away from a number of stereotypical everyday life situations, and which is referenced by the event scenario on account of the fact that speech act is a kind of special event.The author further presents that there are metonymic links between components of speech act scenario and the whole scenario or its CORE, thus by focusing on the specific components of the scenario, indirect utterances somehow seem to be capable of evoking the whole of it and are usually understood as their intended meanings. Moreover, the assumed metonymic links constitute conceptual schema of pragmatic inferencing, which facilitates the easy and effective performance of the indirect speech acts by the interlocutors who express their communication intentions via activating the metonymic' links triggered off by the conventional factors of indirect speech acts. In general, the comprehension of the indirect speech acts involves the conceptual interaction of metonymic inferencing operated on the metaphoric structure within the cognitive context constructed by the 'idealized cognitive model' of speech acts.The presented cognitive analysis of indirect speech acts supports the view that socioculturally conventional and institutional meanings are internalized in terms ofspeech as the symbolic representation of the physical, pre-conceptual experience of force and motion. Moreover, it is assumed that metonymic reasoning and image-schematic structure, apart from accounting for the indirect speech acts, also contribute to the study of other language phenomena such as discoursal coherence, conversation analysis, literary critics and so on. Thus investigating indirect speech acts from the cognitive point of view can further supplement and enrich the pragmatic theories and language research related.