Author(s)

Hui Chen¹, Guojin Hou²

¹Graduate School, Sichuan International Studies University, Chong Qing, China.
²College of Foreign Languages, Huaqiao University, Quan Zhou, China.

Firstly we briefly review the three conceptual domains of Sweetser (1990/2002), “content domain”, “epistemic domain”, and “speech-act domain” (Sweetserian trichotomy), and Shen (2003), the corresponding A(cting), K(nowing), U(ttering) (Shenian trichotomy)—our KAU, finding that they and their followers ignored largely the necessity to distinguish between these three domains in terms of the speaker, the listener and the other. Then, we clarify this issue and on this basis, analyze disadvantages of the study of three conceptual domains at the lexical level, thinking that previous studies failed to highlight the importance of syntactic and pragmatic factors to lexical level and thus did not rise to the pragma-syntactic level. On account of this, we put forward the “Lexico-Pragma-Syntactic Hypothesis” on the three conceptual domains, holding that the three of them should be studied by encompassing the three linguistic levels with pragmatics playing a prevailing role.

Semantic Domains, Lexical Level, Speech Act, Contextual Cues, “Lexico-Pragma-Syntactic Hypothesis”

Chen, H. and Hou, G. (2016) Conceptual Domains of KAU Revisited with Comments on Some Chinese KAU Researches. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 6, 13-24. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2016.61002.