An Analysis Of The Cognitive Mechanism Of Chinese Na-and Shui-Question & Answer Constructions Based On EDs

Question & answer constructions(short for QACs)are common forms of information exchange in everyday life and also an effective channel for people to obtain information in daily dialogues.People also build relationships in this basic exchange process.Chinese na-and shui-QAC is part of Chinese WH-QAC.In previous studies,almost all the relevant researches are concentrated on English WH-QAC,such as who,what,when,where,how,which,why,whom,etc.However,there is no specific research about Chinese na-and shui-QACs.As far as the previous studies are concerned,scholars mainly studied WH-question from the perspective of syntactic,semantic and pragmatic functions,but these studies are horizontal rather than vertical,which means there are few researches about WH-question in dialogues.In recent years,with the advent of Dialogic Syntax,some scholars have begun to analyze the WH-question from the cognitive perspective and the above three methods by placing the WH-question in the context of dialogue.This paper reveals the cognitive mechanisms behind the different degree of resonance of QAC by constructing an “Event Domain-based Dialogic Syntax and Spreading Activation Model”(short for EDS)based on ECM(event domain cognitive model),DS(dialogue syntax)and SAM(Spreading Activation Model).In this study,the author collects about 60800 examples from the Chinese corpus BCC by exhaustive investigation,and finally gets 608 by selection of every hundred,forming a solid and reliable data for the research to reveal the dialogic syntactic features of Chinese na-and shui-QACs and explain the varying degrees of semantic,syntactic and pragmatic resonance of them.The tables of data analysis are on Page 56 and 57.The main contributions of this paper are as follows:First of all,EDS is constructed to analyze the generative mechanism of Chinese na-and shui-QACs,based on the deficiency of the past three theories(DS,ECM and SAM).Secondly,most studies focus on the syntactic structure and semantics of individual interrogative sentences.However,this study argues that questions and answers should be studied together and that we should place interrogative sentences in the context so as to study the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic resonance of Chinese na-and shui-QACs.Thirdly,For Chinese na-and shui-QACs,the proportions of significant and active resonance at the syntactic and semantic levels are far greater than that of lazy resonance,which shows that both speakers are kind of clear about each other's ECM so that they can activate each other's ECM.