A Study Of Idiom-Literalisation Garden Path Based On Pragma-Coercion Construal Model

Garden path(GP), a very commonly used humourous device, can be the result of syntactic, semantic, phonetic, and pragmatic factors. As a sub-type of GP, idiom-literalisation garden path(ILGP) is caused by the literalisation of the meaning of an idiom.So far, scholars both at home and abroad have yielded abundant research findings in terms of GP and the recent trend of GP researches is: from the description of language facts to the corpus-based cognitive interpretation; from the qualitative description to quantitative analysis. However, the cognitive interpretation research is not nearly enough and the method of quantitative analysis also remains to be improved. Hence, researchers are supposed to explore its internal mechanism through the language phenomenon. Besides, ILGP has not been touched yet since it was listed as a new sub-type of GP. This thesis studies the production and interpretation mechanism of ILGP from the pragma-cognitive perspective through integrating Hou Guojin's(2015a, b) Pragmatic Coercion Hypothesis(PCH) with Langacker's(1991) Construal Theory(CT).Through analysing the merits and demerits of PCH and CT in interpreting ILGP respectively, the thesis points out that PCH could not explain the conversion from the expected meaning to the unexpected one during the process of ILGP, while CT could solve the issue of cognitive conversion but shows its weakness in terms of pragmatic factors involved in ILGP. Therefore, an integrated Pragma-Coercion Construal Model(PCC Model) is established to make sure that ILGP is interpreted through the combination of their strengths.The current study adopts the qualitative analysis and is to a great degree explanation-oriented. The collected examples of ILGP are categorised into such three types as decomposable ILGP, abnormally decomposable ILGP and nondecomposable ILGP, which are analysed in light of the newly proposed PCC Model. It is concluded that the production and interpretation of ILGP is a process consisting of a setup stage turning out the speaker's misuse or ad hoc/ emergent use of the meaning of an idiom, prompted by pragmatic coercion/ pragma-coercion and an input stage involving a meaning shift from the expected one to the unexpected one, which is actually the shift from one way of construal to another reflected in such five aspects as specificity, scope, background, perspective and prominence.