Cognitive Processing Of Causality In Chinese Discourse: A Study On Understanding And Prosodic Production

Causality is a fundamental and important way for human beings to perceive the world and explain the development of things.Language(including written language and spoken language),as a communicational medium,reflects the causal relationship in the objective world,as well as the reconstruction by users' subjective cognition.In recent years,the surface syntactic representation,surface prosodic representation and cognitive processing of causality have become a hot topic in cognitive linguistics,psycholinguistics.At the same time,the research in the syntactic representation has brought a great development in the field of intelligent interactive systems.As an analytic language,Chiense is quite different from European languages,in that linear order and function words are the main methods to express grammatical meanings.This study aims at investigating the relationship between surface representations of causal relation in Chinese spoken discourses and its logico-semantic meanings,especially the cognitive pattern of causal relations in spoken discourses.To be specific,we we applied a multidisciplinary approach including corpora analysis,psycholinguistics and acoustic analysis,described the surface syntactic representation,reveal the mechanism of cognition,and investigated the prosodic patterns of causality in Chinese spoken discourses.The main innovations and contributions are summarized as follows.1.This research improves the understanding of description of the surface syntactic representation of causal relations in Chinese spoken discourses: in the surface syntactic representation,this dissertation,instead of being restricted to causal sentences with explicit conjunctions,in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory,investigated the presence and absence of conjunctions,as well as the linear order of cause and effect clauses,in terms of the overall causal sentences for the first time.At the same time,Nuclearity,indicating discourse focus,was also associated in describing and summarizing the distribution patterns of conjunctions and linear orders of causal sentences.The results show no order preference in the spoken Chinese,but linear order was a strategy of the speaker to indicate the discourse focus;the implicit causal relation without conjunctions was the dominant form of causality in spoken Chinese,occupying 91%;however,the rare use of the conjunction “Yin Wei” showed a pragmatic function by embodying the speakers' communicative intention of emphasizing the following cause clause.This very innovative dissertation provides a more comprehensive description of the surface syntactic representation of causal sentences in spoken Chinese,which has filled the gap of previous research,further gives a valuable reference for related research,and guides a greater depth of understanding of causal relations in Chinese discourses.2.This research deepens the understanding of the cognitive prodecure of causal relations in Chinese discourses and answers the questions of inferences of run-on sentences: in the cognitive processing of Chinese causal relations,our reading materials,instead of being restricted to causal sentences that included only cause and effect clauses,were expanded to the discourse level,including a background sentence,and a causal sentence.By conducting off-lien and on-line eye-tracking experiments with conjunctions and linear orders crossingly manipulated,this dissertation investigated the processing of causal relations in discourses.Results showed that readers did have a conjunction and Cause-Effect order preference of causal relations in the off-line rating.However,no evidence showed that this preference influenced its overall on-line processing,nor did any of the manipulations.That is to say,the presence and absence of the conjunction,together with the different linear orders,did not influence the correct and instant construction of the logico-semantic relations.This also explained the large number of run-on sentences in the spoken Chinese.The study also found that the conjunction “Yin Wei” significantly influenced the processing of cause clause in different stage.The cause clause after “Yin Wei” attracted more attention in the late processing,indicating the spotlight effect of the conjunction.The cognitive research on causality first makes a breakthrough in the material design,which expands from the sentence level to the discourse level.Secondly,regarding the phenomenon of run-on sentences in Chinese discourse,this study gives an explanation from the perspective of cognitive processing,provides reference for relevant cognitive experiments,and has practical theoretical value and guiding significance for the cognitive processing of causality in Chinese.Finally,we propose the concept of “Logic Focus in Causality” for the first time,since we find the conjunction “Yin Wei” marks discourse focus in the distribution study,and attracts more attention in the cognitive processing.3.This research pineers the focus distribution and its prosodic realization of causal relations in Chinese discourses: in the speech production of Chinese causal relations,we first examined the focus position and its prosodic realization in causal complex sentences in isolation context(carrying Logic Focus only),expanding the focus related research from simple sentences level to the complex sentences level,from simple cognition to logico-semantic cognition,from textbased focus judgement to its prosodic realization.Secondly,we further investigated the stress assignment and is realization in causal complex sentences in question-answer dialogue(carrying both discourse focus and Logic Focus),expanding this research from complex sentence level to discourse level.The prosodic pattern showed that the Logic Focus was always realized.After its realization,the discourse focus presented a modulation effect.Compared with previous research on the sentence level focus placement and the according stress assignment,our research pioneers the focus research on complex sentence level and discourse level,and provides reference for research on other logico-semantic relations on complex sentence and discourse level.As a cross-field study that covers cognitive linguistics,psycholinguistics and experimental phonetics,our innovative work,from the perspective of cognition,contributes to the understanding and production of causal relations in Chinese spoken discourses.