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The Study of Chinese Safety Warnings from the Perspective of Windowing of Attention

Author: ZhangShuan
Tutor: HuangXueJun
School: Southwestern University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: safety warnings event frame windowing of attention metonymy
CLC: H13
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 49
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Abstract

Safety warnings are not only a kind of language in use. but also a type of cognitive process in studying accidents. Being human’s experience, an accident is constituted by means of people’s interacting with the physical world. In the process, people acquire the concept and reasoning related to the accident. Generally speaking, an accident is defined as "an unpleasant event that happens unexpectedly and causes injure or damage", failing to concern the cause and the countermeasure of it. In order to prevent accidents from happening, safety warnings warn people of the potential dangers resulting in accidents or appeal to people for taking countermeasures in time. Moreover, the cause of an accident, the accident and the countermeasures are all event frames. Nevertheless, what the safety warnings motivate is an EVENT FRAME consisting of the causing event frame, caused event frame (accident), countermeasure event frame which constitute the relationship of causation and co-evoking. In the causal chain of an accident EVENT FRAME, some event frame(s) is/are windowed, while other one(s) is/are gapped. This process of warning is actually conceptual metonymy in which one or more event frame(s) get mental access to the other ones within the EVENT FRAME in which the causing event frame and the caused event frame function as source concept and countermeasure event frame as target concept. Moreover, the visual metonymy and double metonymy play important roles in interpreting some safety warnings. According to different windowed event frame(s) within EVENT FRAME, safety warnings fall into different patterns among which are not clearly demarcated but can be transformed to each other flexibly. Three principles of choosing source concept function to be valid in judging safety warnings, which is inspiring in designing and modifying safety warnings.Windowing of attention can be applied to studying components of sentence as well as event frames represented by sentences in EVENT FRAME. People get mental access to some event frames through windowed ones because of their conceptual contiguity. Therefore, this thesis classifies the Chinese safety warnings within Talmy’s (2000) "event frame" by means of different windowed event frame(s). In the process, metonymy functions as a tool of interpreting and windowing of attention as normal in classifying Chinese safety warnings. This thesis, for the first time, gets the cognitive approaches to Chinese safety warnings. On the one hand, deeper and more comprehensive understanding is acquired; on the other hand, windowing of attention is proved to be valid in studying other linguistic phenomena.

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CLC: > Language, writing > Chinese > Semantics,vocabulary, word meaning ( exegesis )
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