Abstract: Existing linguistic research on titles has shown that there has been atendency to use two components (usually separated by a colon) to form titles in general research papers. This paper endeavors to explore the cognitivemechanism and the pragmatic motivation of the titles of research papers on pragmatics. The paper is based on 1212 titles selected from the Journal ofPragmatics, published from 1995 through to 2009. The cognitive mechanism of these titles is interpreted in light of cognitive metonymy. Moreover, thepragmatic motivation of these titles is explicated according to the law of diminishing marginal utility of speech and the multimotivatedness ofspeech acts, two important tenets of econopragmatics.