A Cognitive Approach To "Zenme"-type Rhetorical Questions

Rhetorical Questions (RQs), an important sentence type in human speech withvarious forms and complicated functions, are often used in daily communication."Zenme"-type RQs, as one of the most frequently used subtypes of RQs, not onlypossesses the characteristics of RQs, but also bears its own features. Up to these days,many scholars focus on the study of "zenme"-type RQs from different perspectives,such as syntactic approach, semantic approach and pragmatic approach. However,they hardly pay attention to the cognitive study of it.The author of this thesis chooses "Zenme"-type RQs as the object of study andanalyses its negative meanings and meaning types. In the analysis of the semanticchange of "zenme" and "Zenme"-type RQs, this thesis adopts grammaticalizationand finds that the degree of the intensrety of a "zenme"-type RQ is proportional tothe grammticalization of the interrogative pronoun "zenme". In order to study thenegative meanings of "Zenme"-type RQs, this thesis discusses three kinds ofnegative objects of "Zenme"-type RQs in three negative domains and gets aconclusion that "Zenme"-type RQ can get three different interpretations in the abovethree negative domains,"Neg+Mod+do X","Neg+Mod+think X","Neg+Mod+say X".Based on precise analysis, main findings can be found as follows:First of all, about the semantic change of the word "Zenme", we find that thehigher degree of the intensity a sentence has the lower degree of the original meaningthe interrogative pronoun has. However, the lower degree of the intensity a sentencehas, the higher degree of the original meaning an interrogative pronoun has.Secondly, in the process of the production of negative meanings,"Zenme"-typeRQs form three negative domains which are called acting, knowing and utteringdomain."Zenme"-type RQs can get three different interpretations in the above threenegative domains,"Neg+Mod+do X","Neg+Mod+think X","Neg+Mod+say X". Among the above three interpretations,"Neg+Mod+do X" and "Neg+Mod+say X" belong to the meaning type of deontic modality,"Neg+Mod+think X"belongs to epistemic modality.The thesis consists of five chapters including introduction and conclusion part.Chapter One makes a brief introduction to the paper, including the research topic,the rationale of the study, methodology and the outline of the paper. Chapter Twopresents a retrospection of previous studies of RQs and "Zenme"-type RQs. ChapterThree focuses on the introduction of the theoretical basis. In particular,grammaticalization and three domains which are called acting domain, knowingdomain and uttering domain are talked about. Chapter Four is devoted to the datadescription and data analysis by adopting the cognitive theories introduced in theprevious chapter. Chapter Five draws a conclusion from the above research, whichincludes the major findings of this study on the one hand, and the limitations andsuggestions for the further research on the other.