The Analysis Of The Generation Of Chinese Brain-twister By Autonomy-Dependency Framework

The present study is a cognitive pragmatic analysis of the generation of Chinese brain-twister.Chinese brain-twister, as a special kind of language phenomenon, has attracted extensive attention from scholars in various fields. There is no doubt that the achievements of previous researches on Chinese brain-twister and relevant language phenomena facilitate the present study. However, limitations still exist in these researches. The previous work mainly focuses on the superficial traits of the language form of Chinese brain-twisters such as the classification and the ways to design them according to the linguistic strategies they adopt. The attention on the internal mechanism of Chinese brain-twisters is far from enough. Hence the present study chooses to approach Chinese brain-twister from cognitive pragmatic perspective with a view of providing a comprehensive and detail illustration for its generative process. In order to have a clearer notion of Chinese brain-twister, the thesis distinguishes it from other relevant language phenomena such as riddle, deliberate misinterpretation, English conundrums and humour. Furthermore, its characteristics are also expounded in the paper.With regard to the research methodology, the current study mainly relies on the qualitative analysis of the data. Theoretically, with Professor Xu Shenghuan's Autonomy-Dependency Framework as the general guiding framework, we concentrate on a dynamic study of the generation process of Chinese brain-twister. The theory holds it as its basic idea that the explicit expression of an utterance is derived from the intentional content in a speaker's mind with the constraint of the communicative intentionality by making use of the principle of similarity/proximity. Xu's theory ushers in a new perspective for the study of language application. Based on the Xu's framework, the thesis attempts to build up a frame work for Chinese brain-twisters. Accordingly, a series of important concepts in the framework and their relations to Chinese brain-twister are expounded in the thesis. As for a brain-twister, the intentional content consists of the integration of the question part and the answer part. It is a proposition which will be divided into two parts in actual communication. While the intentional attitude requires that an initiator or a designer should express his/her utterance indirectly or in an unusual and novel way so as to mislead the recipients in their logical process. Therefore, the designer deliberately makes his/her utterance ambiguous by making use of similarity/proximity. In terms of the explicit expression of Chinese brain-twister, it has the following features. (i) its grammatical structure tends to be loose. (ii) its language expression is ambiguous (iii) its literal meaning makes contrast with the implication. (iv) the relationship between the literal expression and the implicit expression of a Chinese brain-twister is unconventional.The generation of a brain-twister is realized by the following steps: (i) establish the intention to design a brain-twister. (ii) try to deviate from d1 which serves as A2 by making ambiguity with guidance of the principle of similarity and proximity. (iii) make sure that the final derivation of dn and the stereotypical expression dl are in contrast with each other and the conventional understanding of the final derivation will produce so many uncertain answers that recipients can realize themselves trapped, requiring a reasoning again. (iv) realize the explicit expression of a brain-twister in communication.In designing a brain-twister, the designer tries to create a linguistic context which is ambiguous enough to trap recipients. And he/she knows that recipients would be likely to fall into the linguistic trap that he/she makes because there are some prerequisites for him/her to do so. The prerequisites for generating a brain-twister involve such cognitive facts as mutuality of logical reasoning process, mutuality of encyclopedic information, mutuality of linguistic information and mutuality of immediate linguistic context.The thesis also classifies linguistic strategies adopted in designing Chinese brain-twisters into three categories in broad sense and each one has further subcategories. The major categories are: (i) semantic means (ii) syntactic means (iii) pragmatic means. It is worthy noting that sometimes more than one means is used in designing a brain-twister and there is no clear-cut boundary between them.The present study has made a tentative analysis of the generation of Chinese brain-twister, and some issues need to be further investigated in the future.