ON THE WAY FROM THOUGHTS TO UTTERANCES: METONYMIC NATURE OF SERBIAN REQUESTS

Abstract

The cognitive processеs which appear on the way from thoughts to utterances are not merely complex, but intriguing for both the linguistic discipline of pragmatics and the one of cognitive linguistics. Prior to structuring some thoughts into words, we do not only consider the cognitive patterns to become uttered, but we also pay specific attention to the way in which our words can be perceived by our interlоcutors, since once we utter something, that very moment it becomes not just a word, but a deed. Then again, not all the speech acts possess the same illocutionary force; namely, some of them bear a stronger potential to threaten the individuality of our interlocutor/-s than others. Among those speech acts that possess a rather strong potential for threatening the face of the hearer there is the speech act of request. In order for the communication process to be successful, smooth and interlocutorsfriendly, we tend to apply some linguistic strategies when performing face-threatening speech acts. The purpose of the strategies we use is to modify (usually to soften/mitigate) the potentially threatening speech acts, protecting in this way the inherent trait of individuality humans project. In the mitigation process, the cognitive linguistic phenomenon of conceptual metonymy has been detected as a frequent one, and not only that, it can also be said that correct interpretation of indirect speech acts, without the awareness and understanding of their metonymic background, would be very difficult to achieve. On the basis of the theoretical background which represents the synergy of notions from pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, this paper analyses the role of conceptual metonymy at the crossroads of the mentioned linguistic disciplines. The aim of the paper is to examine to what extent the Serbian language native speakers apply metonymic relationships in the process of requests' performance and in what way the metonymic mappings modify illocutionary force of requests. The analysed data was gathered via written Discourse Completion Test and then analysed at two stages – first, the pragmatic taxonomy of (in-)directness, with the aim of determining the levels of (in- )directness, was used; second, metonymic operations employed were described and linked with the notions of speech act modification and indirectness. The results of the study have shown a frequent employment of metonymic mappings by Serbian native speakers in the speech act of requesting, which confirmed a strong bond between pragmatics and cognitive linguistics and represented the phenomenon of metonymic mapping as a powerful linguistic strategy in the illocutionary force modification process.