A Cognitive Study Of Syllepsis And Zeugma

The rhetoric study, with metaphor research as its representative, has a long history. Aristotle, the initiator of the classic school, thinks that metaphor is only a rhetoric method, which is different from everyday language and is a deviation from the conventional language. On the contrary, the romantic school, which is represented by English Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, holds a quite different point of view. According to this school, metaphor is an organic component of language and there is not any discrepancy between everyday language and poetic language. During 70s of 20th century, many disciplines such as linguistics, psychology and philosophy take metaphor as its own research objective and a number of theories appear. The newly sprung-up cognitive linguistics deems the rhetoric as the pilot science of the linguistics. It uses metaphor to explain a large amount of language phenomena, including grammatical ones.The unprecedented enthusiasm was created after the book Metaphor We Live By was published by Lakoff and Johnson. Another stimulus came from the Fauconnier's study on Mental Space and Concept Blending and Langacker's Cognitive Grammar. The creation and understanding of syllepsis and zeugma also appeal to the mechanism of metaphor. The theory of Mental Space and Concept Blending can clearly explain the producing process of these two figures of speech. Besides, if Relevance Theory, which is created by Sperber and Wilson and regarded as the foundation of the cognitive pragmatics, explains the principle of inference from surface meanings to deep meanings, we can also use it to analyze syllepsis and zeugma. The optimal relevance's seeking is also the optimal choices of every possible meaning. Here the Optimality Theory can show the process of meaning seeking more easily after the relevance is created.This thesis is intended to probe into the operational mechanism of the processes of producing and understanding syllepsis and zeugma from the cognitive perspective, using the theories of Mental Space and Relevance. The first chapter of the paper introduces the history and present development of rhetoric study and cognitive linguistics, and briefly lists the achievements of studying rhetoric from cognitive aspects. The second chapter gives the definition of syllepsis and zeugma and provides in detail the ground of studying syllepsis and zeugma cognitively. Following this in the third chapter, the theory of Mental Space and Conceptual Blending is used to analyze the producing of syllepsis and zeugma. In the fourth chapter, Relevance Theory, together with Optimality Theory, is used to elucidate how the right meaning of these two rhetoric methods is chosen and understood during understanding them. The conclusion is made in the fifth chapter, which claims that syllepsis and zeugma are not so mysterious that only a genius could employ them; both of them are also the results of application of basic cognitive methods; although they stress different aspects, those linguistic theories are complementary; and some further assumptions of researches on these two rhetoric methods from cognitive perspectives are put forward.