A Cognitive Pragmatic Analysis To Metalinguistic Negation

Such special linguistic phenomenon as Metalinguistic Negation (MN) can be found in many languages. Basically, the traditional studies of MN are of the category of semantics. Researchers only concentrate on the MN forms, failing to take the communicators into account, so they can't satisfactorily answer questions concerning the nature and inference of MN. Adopting the cognitive linguistic notion of "Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM)" and the Relevance-Theoretic notion of "Metarepresentation" and the Relevance-Theoretic inferential model, this thesis researches the features, the nature and the decoding process of MN.From cognitive point of view, meaning is in fact the communicators' intention, which only lies in communications. So the study of MN must consider both the speaker and the hearer and the context as well. In the speaker's perspective, MN is indeed a special linguistic metarepresentation phenomenon; by "special" we mean: 1) seeming mixed-quotation form, namely, the speaker borrows the original expressions for his own use in the literal meanings of MN; 2) incompleteness; and 3) implicitness. In the hearer's perspective, because the decoding of MN relies much on the context, MN is a kind of "pragmatic negation". In nature, MN is the negation of "preferential Idealized Cognitive Model (PICM)". PICM refers to the ICM intentionally or subconsciously primarily taken by people under a specific situation as their background knowledge for the need of their present communication or comprehension. So MN occurs between two ICMs, while most other negations only occur within an ICM. This can differentiate MN from other kinds of negations.The inference of MN is the decoding of the speaker's real intention. According to the Relevance-Theoretic inferential ideas, we propose a five-step inferential model: i)...