A Metonymic Study Of Indirect Speech Acts From The Cognitive Perspective

The study of speech acts has always been a central issue of pragmatics. Thegenerating and understanding of speech acts, especially, indirect speech acts, hasreceived a lot of attention among pragmatists for a long time. Traditional pragmatictheories to the interpretation of indirect speech acts leave certain problems unsolved andneed to be improved. These theories, on the one hand, do not provide a satisfactoryexplanation to the fact that participants in a conversation usually make inferences toacquire the intended meaning very quickly and effortlessly; on the other hand, they donot give a systematic account of the specific inference patterns that are involved or theircognitive motivation for indirect speech acts interpretation.With the development of cognitive linguistics, more and more cognitive linguistssuggest that indirect speech acts should be explained from a cognitive perspective.Thornburg and Panther (1997) propose their theory of speech act metonymy. Themetonymy in cognitive linguistics is a conceptual phenomenon and a cognitive processwhere a source content provides mental access to a target content within the sameidealized cognitive model.This thesis attempts to interpret and analyze indirect speech acts from the cognitiveperspective, specifically a metonymic approach put forward by Thornburg and Panther.According to them, metonymy is instrumental in indirectly performing linguistic actions.In a speech act scenario, there are three phases or components: BEFORE, CORE/RESULT, AFTER. Each component has the potential to “stand for” or “point to” thewhole scenario metonymically. Relationships bearing metonymic function, such aspart-whole, cause-effect, ability-action, etc. facilitate the inferential work ofconversation participants and have great significance in indirect speech actscomprehension.Indirect speech acts can be classified into two types: one is conventionalizedindirect speech acts and the other is non-conventionalized indirect speech acts. Thisthesis demonstrates that conventionalized ISAs differ formally from the direct speechacts whose general form they share as well as other ISAs with the same illocutionary force which are called non-conventionalized ISAs. Both of these two kinds of ISAs canbe explained under speech act metonymies which provide cognitive motivation forpragmatic inference and the interpretation of indirect speech acts.Though the speech act metonymy theory by P&T has advantages over theprevious pragmatic theories, it is still far from enough without taking pragmaticparameters into consideration. Therefore, the propositional ICMs (P&T’s scenario pluspragmatic parameters) are proposed to be a better way in understanding and interpretingindirect speech acts. The significance of this model lies in that it is an improvement ofthe speech act metonymies and can distinguish between certain subtypes of indirectdirectives and different types of indirect requests. The author attempts to illustrate thatthe propositional ICMs can be applied to comparative conversation analysis.