An Investigation On Linguistic Representation Of Mental State Information

Mental states that have a significant position in Theory of Mind(To M),refer to those internal workings that are available to predicate and explain one’s behavior,for instance,feelings,intentions,desires,attitudes,beliefs,knowledges,opinions,etc.However,as a concept raises in developmental psychology,the existing researches concerning with the linguistic representation of mental state information just focus on one facet of it,mainly lexicon or sentence,being scattered,less systematic,and not comprehensive enough.Taking English fairy tales,Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Grimms’ Fairy Tales,as materials,this thesis builds up a model of the linguistic representation of mental state information.Fairy tales as a major kind of language source for young children,which frequently center on the actions and interactions of people or personified animals,are coded with abundant and diverse mental state expressions.The representation of one mental state information is certain mental state that the Presenter shows to a particular circumstance,the Detailed State Information,which can be characterized by mental state terms in five categories: Emotional State,Cognitive State,Desire and Volition State,Moral Evaluation and Obligation State,and Perception State.Therefore,according to such a characteristic,there are four main elements in this modal: the Presenter of that mental state,Mental Stem(mostly represented by mental terms)that can be used to judge the category of such a mental state representation,the Detailed State Information the Presenter has under such a state,and the auxiliary Context assisting the predication to get this mental state.Based on this modal,this project has an investigation on the linguistic representation of mental state information in these two collections from the perspective of lexicon,sentence,and discourse.Moreover,compared with the traditional discussion of mental terms mainly focuses on mental verbs and epistemic modal verbs,deontic modality,evidentials,and discourse connectives are also involved under the category of mental terms in this thesis,based on the true principle “mental terms can convey one or more mental state information”.More specifically,this set of new mental terms can represent mental state information from two approaches,semantic one and pragmatic one.Meanwhile,according to the number of mental states,and the relationship between or among them,the representation of mental state information at syntax is represented as a single mental state,coordinated mental states,and nested mental states.Through such a multi-level and multi-perspective investigation,this project is aiming to testify the explanatory power of the cognitive model of mental state information,hoping to provide some references and materials for the subsequent researches on mental states.There are three major findings.First of all,the linguistic representation of children’s mental state information centers on “Mental Presenter + Mental Stem”,with the detailed content of this state being the complement or object frequently.Secondly,from the perspective of the categorization of mental states,mental stems of emotional states are with a richest diversity and density,while the ways of representing cognitive states are most various.Compared with the other four that are represented by mental verbs mainly,there are more classes for Emotional State terms,including verb,noun,adjectives,and adverbs;what’s more,the subtypes of this state are also abundant,in terms of eight emotions,happiness,like,sadness,anger,fear,surprise,anxiety,hate,and lexicons representing those emotions are also plentiful,for instance there are over 30 different tokens for the single emotion “Happiness” like happy,delight,merrily,joy,rejoice.Moreover,the approaches to represent Cognitive States is the most various one,which can be conveyed by the think-it-so thoughts through some modal verbs,and the inferential structure of “premise-conclusion” through epistemic modality,evidentials,and discourse connectives.Thirdly,due to the competence of its readers,mental state information in syntax in the two collections is mostly single mental state or coordinated or nested mental states with three levels at most.