| The rhetorical question is a false question whose literal form is opposite to the actual meaning,and is frequently employed in modern Chinese conversations with diverse sentence patterns and rich discourse functions.Its research has always been a hot and difficult topic in the academic circle,which mainly consists of three paradigms:1)inheriting the traditional grammar of western structuralism;2)the holistic view represented by the "three-plane theory";3)pluralistic and multi-perspective functionalism.The achievement of the first paradigm is to establish the ontological status of the rhetorical questions and clarify the basic approach of research,yet it still belongs to extensive basic research.The achievement of the second paradigm is to focus on the three planes of syntax,semantics and pragmatics at the same time,but it also takes a static view and regards the three as isolated planes,which are often disjointed and unbalanced.The third paradigm highlights the pragmatic features of the rhetorical questions,but fails to give a systematic cognitive description of their structure.The three paradigms mentioned above lack cutting-edge theories and quantitative analysis together with research methods aging.Therefore,this author is to construct the ECM-based autonomy/dependent and figure/ground Model(Event-based AD-FG Model,Model of EAF for short)on the basis of cognitive linguistics,dialogic syntax and ECM(Event domain Cognitive Model),and gets corpa from BCC to analyze such construction from the perspective of syntax,semantics and pragmatics in detail.The main contributions of this paper are as follows:1.Proposing EAF theoretical modelThis paper attempts to construct an EAF model,arguing that the cognitive operation mechanism of the construction of the rhetorical-question-typed dialogue in the modern Chinese language is as follows: sharing the same conversational event domain,the initiating language and the responding language forming adjacent pairs.They have three levels of autonomous/dependent connection.Firstly,the responding language depends on the initiating language,thus parallel structure generated.Secondly,the parallel structure depends on resonance and generates a conversational schema structure.Lastly,the construction of engagement(discourse function of dialogue syntax)depends on the dialogic schema,and finally reaches the construction of dialogic syntax.According to the EAF model,this kind of pair construction is mainly based on four different dialogic event frameworks:1)highlighting the element of being;2)highlighting actional elements;3)highlighting the elements of both being and action;4)highlighting a level of actional elements.They generate four corresponding pairs of syntactic structures:(1)changing the subject;(2)changing the main predicate;(3)changing both the subject and the main predicate;(4)not replacing either the subject or the main predicate.2.Establishing a closed corpus for quantitative research.Based on corpus from BCC,this paper collects 3,000 pairs of discourse whose responding question is the rhetorical question.According to the type of the responding language,altogether there are 10 categories: 1)the category of "don’t";2)the category of "how";3)the category of "where";4)the category of "what";5)the category of "who";6)the category of "he"(including "why not","why","why ever" and "why bother");7)the category of "being embarrassed";8)the category of "not";9)the category of "no";10)"think+ statement-typed clause" category.This paper exploits the EAF model to reveal the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features of such constructions.3.Analyzing the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the three types of rhetorical-question dialogic constructionsThis paper attempts to illustrate different levels of resonance with syntactic resonance,semantic resonance and pragmatic resonance.The syntactic,semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the three types of rhetorical-question dialogic constructions are as follows:1)Syntactic featuresIt can be seen from the EAF model that the structure of rhetorical-question-typed dialogic constructions can be divided into three categories in terms of syntactic form and resonance type.These include complete syntactic resonance,partial syntactical resonance and zero syntactic resonance.Based on the syntactic commonality of the structure of rhetorical-question dialogue,the three kinds of pairs represent different syntactic characteristics(detailed figures willed be presented in chapter 8):(1)Most of the complete resonance is undoubtedly a subject-predicate sentence,consisting of two completely parallel single sentences,which can be divided into two types: rhetorical question responding language and both initiating language and responding language are rhetorical questions).(2)Partial resonance is divided into 7 different types.(3)In zero resonance,the responding language is a soliloquy that does not require the other party to make any response.Its syntactic forms are roughly divided into three types.There are two types of syntactical autonomous and dependency structures in the structure of rhetorical-question dialogic construction:(1)syntactical frame resonance,(2)the double resonancet of both syntactical frame and focus.The former can be divided into two forms:the sole resonance of partial sentential structure;the double resonance of both syntactic frame and focus.The latter is a structure with the syntactic frame as the background and the focal point as the figure.The syntactic characteristics of the language pair can be divided into four types: changing the subject,changing the predicate,changing both the subject and the predicate,and not changing either the subject or the predicate.From the perspective of ECM,these four different subject-predicate relationships represent different graphic/background relationships between being and actional elements in the event domain.2)Semantic featuresThere are two kinds of automous and dependent structures in the semantic structure of the rhetorical-question dialogic constructions: a)the resonance of the partial semantic framework;b)the double resonance of both the semantic framework and the semantic contrast focus,and the latter can be divided into four categories.The double resonance of both the semantic framework and the semantic focus are based on the former as the background and the latter as the graph.According to ECM,semantic relationships represent different graphical/background relationships between agent and action elements in the event domain.Based on the semantic commonality of the structure of the rhetorical-question dialogic constructions,the three types of language pairs display different characteristics:A)From the perspective of semantic intensity,the intensity of subjective modality is proportional: the degree of the subjective modality of complete consensus,partial resonance and zero resonance is in the order of the strongest,the second and the weakest.B)From the perspective of semantic direction,the semantic direction of complete resonance is directly aimed at the rationality of the behavior,and the semantic direction of partial resonance is indirectly aimed at the behavior,and the semantic direction of zero resonanc is directly aimed at the common understanding of the behavior.3)Pragmatic characteristicsThe property of the dialogic pragmatic event can be described as follows.The use of modern Chinese rhetorical-question dialogic construction indicates that both parties intend to establish a kind of interpersonal interaction,whose pragmatic features is to meet the pragmatic intention of the dilemma(It is possible to "threaten" the other side’s face,and at the same time "take care" of the other side’s face),implementing a kind of the conventional indirect speech act,and whose basic principle of the behavior follows the politeness principle at the expense of the rule of cooperative principle,thus realizing the politeness principle in different degree of generous criteria.There are two kinds of automous and dependent structures in the pragmatics of the rhetorical-question construction.The type of pragmatic resonance generates the following 3 discourse types: changing topic,changing comment,changing both topic and comment.From the perspective of the event-domain cognitive model,these different pragmatic relationships represent the different graphical/background relationships between topic and comment elements in the event-domain.Based on the constructional grammar view of cognitive linguistics,the law of dialogic syntax and ECM,this paper constructs an EAF model and a closed corpus,and quantitatively analyzes the cognitive mechanism,motivation and specific distribution of the structure of the rhetorical-question dialogic construction.However,the scope of the research,the size of the corpus,English-Chinese contrast,and other aspects need to be further explored. |
PDF Full Text Request