A Cognitive Analysis Of Echo Questions In English Dialogue Based On SCD Model

The echo question is a kind of popular but uncommon question.With its“unpredictable” form and its “elusive” meaning,it doesn’t seem to obey the rules like what other interrogatives do.Some achievements have been made in its research at home and abroad,but there are also some problems.Theoretical frameworks in some studies are not comprehensive enough with only one-sided explanation which is insufficient,and some researches lack data support.In addition,scholars mainly focus on Cooperative Principle,Relevance Theory,Speech Act Theory and Meta-representation,in which innovation is in need,not to mention an in-depth elucidation of the cognitive mechanism behind echo questions from the perspective of dialogic resonance.From the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics,this thesis attempts to integrate SOS Multiple-interaction Understanding Model,Construal Theory(including“salience”),Dialogic Syntax and Schema-Instance View to construct SCD Model(Figure 3.7,p.39),applying it to the analysis of the cognitive generative mechanism of echo questions in English conversations and to the explanation of the cognitive factors for echo questions,as well as systematically exploring their rules and features in syntax,semantics and pragmatics.In this kind of dialogues,due to the cognitive differences between the two parties towards the same object and in the multiple interactions of “subject-object-subject”,echo question is produced through selective reproduction of parts or all of the prior utterance,which instantiates the schema activated by the prior utterance,achieving different degrees of syntax resonance,semantic correspondence and pragmatic interaction,so as to achieve meaning negotiation and cognitive coordination.The author collects 1078 pairs of English conversations containing echo questions from a large-scale classic American TV series Old Friends and gets 154 pairs as an enclosed corpus for SCD analysis by choosing one pair in every seven.The cognitive motivations and features of English echo question pairs are described in detail,and the frequency is calculated to reveal the rules of English echo questions.According to the analysis of statistics,we can conclude that:In the English dialogue containing echo questions,salience is one of the main factors to form the cognitive differences between the two parties of communication,especially the salience of relation.At the syntactic level,echo questions have various forms and tend to keep the structure paralleling and word order consistent with their prior utterances.The relationship between prior utterances and echo questions can be expressed as “Instance-(Schema)-Instance”,and “wh-” echo question itself is a schema for the prior utterance,which forms a hierarchical “Schema-Instance”relationship.Semantically speaking,partial resonance happens in most cases,tending to get relevance with the least effort,and the position of resonance focus is mainly at the end of the prior sentence as a way of showing the principle of “End Focus” in English.Pragmatically,passive interactions appear the most and often adopt incomplete cooperative attitudes,and echo questions are pragmatically enriched.The main contributions of this thesis are as follows:Firstly,under the guidance of Cognitive Linguistics,this thesis attempts to construct SCD Model to explain the cognitive production mechanism of echo questions in English conversations and to reveal the rules and features of echo questions in English from syntactic,semantic and pragmatic aspects.Secondly,Grice’s Cooperative Principle only discusses meaning generation from the semantic level,and Relevance Theory mainly involves semantic relevance.They both ignore the syntactic characteristics of cooperation and relevance.This thesis tries to use SCD Model as a supplement and offers a new way of postmodernist thinking for the dialogic study by combining the perspectives of“embodiment” “dialogue” and “interactivity” in the cognitive study of language,aiming to provide a new perspective for the study of echo questions.Thirdly,according to SCD Model,echo questions can be classified from thefollowing four levels: cognitive factors,syntactic resonance,semantic resonance and pragmatic interaction,which are further divided into several categories.In-depth data statistics based on our enclosed data are carried out(Figure 4.10,p.74).