Abstract:
As a hot topic in the researches of indirect speech acts, indirect directives have been interpreted by a variety of theories, however, so far there is no systematic analysis of the production and comprehension of indirect directives from a cognitive prospective in China. Image schema theory plays an important role in interpreting the cognitive mechanisms of indirect directives. Understanding what is going on in human mind when they produce and comprehend special language phenomena such as indirect directives can give us insight not only into language, but also into the human cognitive state of thinking, reasoning and communicating with each other.