A Cognitive Approach To Chinese XIEHOUYU

This thesis conducts a qualitative study of Chinese Xiehouyu within a cognitive linguistic framework aiming at revealing its cognitive characteristics, cognitive motivations as well as cognitive grammatical significances.Being a unique and important linguistic form exclusively possessed by Chinese, Xiehouyu is witty and humorous, popular and vivid. It has been widely used in our daily life as well as literary works. Since 1920, plenty of studies on Xiehouyu have been conducted. Unfortunately, previous studies, however affluent they are, are mainly conducted from the perspective of culture, rhetoric, syntax and semantics, dwelling on the argumentation of the origin, denomination, categorization, structure, rhetoric functions, etc. Few researches are conducted from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, let alone Figure-Ground theory.In view of the inadequacy of the previous studies, this thesis attempts to make a relatively thorough and comprehensive research into Chinese Xiehouyu mainly based on the Figure-Ground theory within the framework of cognitive grammar. And for the sake of discussion, other cognitive theories such as Langacker's cognitive reference-point construction, attentional view and relevance theory are also touched upon. The study is conducted mainly from three aspects, namely, identification of figure and ground in Xiehouyu, cognitive motivations of Xiehouyu as well as its cognitive grammatical significance. More specifically, this study has attempted to address the following four research questions in detail:(1) Whether Figure-Ground theory can exert powerful explanatory power on language, especially on Chinese XHY?(2) What are the cognitive characteristics of XHY?(3) What are the cognitive motivations for the production and understanding of XHY?(4) As a type of particular language form, what is the relationship between XHY and normal Chinese linguistic forms? Or to put it another way, does XHY still conform to the general cognitive characteristics of Chinese grammar?Through the analysis of Chinese Xiehouyu from a cognitive approach, the following four findings have been elicited:(1) Figure-ground theory, from the perspective of human cognition, is a new and efficient way to interpret the traditional linguistic phenomena, especially Chinese XHY, having powerful explanatory power.(2) As a distinctive sentence pattern, Xiehouyu is a realization of perceptual figure/ground in language, presenting such a cognitive structure as "ground—intermediate link—figure", in which the communicative focus tends to be placed at the latter part of an utterance.(3) Xiehouyu follows people's universal cognitive features and laws and the understanding of Xiehouyu is an ostensive-inferential process.(4) Particular as the syntactic structure of Xiehouyu is, it still conforms to the general cognitive model and characteristics of Chinese grammar, a typical embodiment of Chinese grammar.