A Cognitive Study Of “Luo X” Construction

New words and expressions are coming into use constantly. In recent years, “Luo X(?X)” construction has been active in popular website and media, and gradually been accepted as a part of the Chinese sight words. Thus, many scholars have paid attention to “Luo X” construction in modern Chinese. Previous studies on “Luo X” construction are conducted from three perspectives: the traditional linguistic studies on “Luo X” construction, the cognitive studies on “Luo X” construction, and the studies on English translation of “Luo X” construction. However, most of them focus on particular “Luo X” words, and their account for the the semantic development of the “Luo X” construction is not comprehensive. In the sixth edition of Modern Chinese Dictionary(2012), 12 related lexical items are totally indexed. This thesis extracts 146 “Luo X” construction that are retrieved in the web corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics Peking University(PKU). Both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques are used to study “Luo X” construction with examples in news from 2006 to 2016 on the website.The research questions of this thesis aim at the syntactic features and the motivations for the generalization and popularization of “Luo X” construction. The theoretical foundations are mainly based on the cognitive approach Idealized Cognitive Models(ICMs) of Lakoff. First, “luo(?)” should be classified as a verb, an adjective, and an adverb. It is a morpheme, the word class of which often depends on the “X” in “Luo X” construction. Second, the concept “luo” should be defined with respect to an ICM. The concept “luo” in Chinese normally is based on a complex model in which six individual models combine to form a cluster model:the image model, the relation model, the function model, the ethic model, the art model, and the focus model. The prototype of “luo” is an ICM, which satisfies all these six models; others are distant members, and the least prototypical members satisfy only one model. So “Luo X” construction can be classified as prototypical members and non-prototypical members. The latter is the semantic extension of the former. Each derivational meaning of “Luo X” construction reflects the cognitive model of its source domain through the pattern of prominence, revision, deletion, metaphor, or metonymy, etc. In addition, owing to its advantage in both linear and hierarchical analysis and dynamic and static description, ICM can be applied to the explanation of polysemous “Luo X” construction. Polysemy is not prototypical and deviates from ICM. Metaphor and metonymy are two main ways to develop these interrelated meanings of polysemous “Luo X” construction. Furthermore, the motivations for the generalization and popularization of “Luo X” construction are ascribed to intralingual motivation(word-formation module), extralinguistic motivation(social development), and psychological motivation. At last, the potential development of “Luo X” construction need the self-adjustment of language and the test of usage in the future.The cognitive study of “Luo X” construction is a primary and tentative study, so there are definitely some limitations in it. However, this thesis provides a potential theoretical framework for cognitive studies on “Luo X” construction and other new words in modern Chinese, which is important for Chinese teaching, translation practice and cross-cultural communication.