The Study On Noun Reduplication In Chinese--From Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

Chinese is a non-inflectional language, so it needs some word-formational devices to form new words or express various grammatical meanings. Reduplication is one of the devices. Reduplication is a very common phenomenon in Contemporary Chinese. The traditional grammarians make a lot of study on reduplication in Chinese, mainly focusing on verbal and adjective reduplication. Noun, as a main word category, its reduplication didn't get as much attention as them.This paper makes a further development on the basis of the study made by the traditional grammarians. This thesis will apply the theories in Cognitive Linguistics to study the semantic meaning and syntactic functions of noun reduplication in Contemporary Chinese. The theoretical framework in this thesis mainly concerns Iconicity theory and Linguistic Decategorization theory. The principles in Iconicity theory concerned in this paper mainly include quantity iconicity and symmetry iconicity. Through the discussion we find out that the noun reduplication is motivated by quantity iconicity in that the reduplicated form corresponds to the increase in the quantity in the conceptual structure. And symmetry iconicity can explain the restrictions on the reduplication of noun. At last the thesis discusses the semantic meaning and the syntactic function of the noun reduplication in Contemporary Chinese by the application of Linguistic Decategorization theory. A conclusion is made that the changes of the meanings and functions after the noun is reduplicated are the result of nominal decategorization. In the process of decategorization, the semantic meaning of the noun is generalized and abstracted. With the generalization and abstraction of meaning, the functions of the reduplicated noun change. The extent to which the reduplicated noun is decategorized depends on the specific context. The highly decategorized reduplicated nouns express the descriptive meaning, deviating from the noun category to other word class categories. The semantic function of the noun changes from the referential function to descriptive function. As for the syntactic functions, the highly decategorized reduplicated nouns can be predicate, attribute, adverbial and predictive. The less decategorized nouns still have referential meaning, but the meanings are generalized. And the reduplicated nouns change from the prototypical members to the marginal members of the noun category. Through the analysis in this thesis, we recognize that language system is not autonomous and it is affected by our cognition.