A Cognitive-pragmatic Study Of Chinese Xiehouyus With Animal Words

Xiehouyu is a special and unique phenomenon of language, which aroused numerous scholars'interest and attention, thus giving rise to many works to account for it. But unfortunately, previous studies are mainly confined to the investigation of its origin, denomination, classification, function, etc. Recently, scholars began to approach it from different perspectives, such as from rhetoric, semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics; but generally speaking, due to lack of closed data corpus and without a comprehensive perspective, their classification seems to be unreasonable, and their account is also unsatisfactory. Therefore, it calls for further investigation.In order to fill in the gap of previous studies, the present thesis attempts to integrate ECM Model, Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory into an integrated model called Event-domain Relevance Blending Model (ERB for short), based on which we classify data and focus on the cognitive understanding mechanism of Chinese Xiehouyus with animal words (Animal Xiehouyus for short). In this thesis, we selected 852 items of Animal Xiehouyus as a closed data corpus from The Dictionary of Chinese Xiehouyu by Liu Yulian & Xu Zhimin (2004). Based on the date analysis, a qualitative and quantitative research is conducted under the framework of ERC Model.The paper consists of the following five chapters.Chapter One concentrates on a general introduction to this study, consisting of its rationale, methodology and data collection as well as layout.Chapter Two presents the literature review of the Chinese Xiehouyu. On the one hand, the author is summarizing and commenting on the previous achievements of Chinese Xiehouyu researches. And on the other hand, pages mainly go to the presentation of the cognitive theory of CBT and RT studies on Chinese Xiehouyu. Finally, the paper presents the gap in the previous studies.Chapter Three is the theoretical framework. The framework, which is primarily based on the linguistic theory of the Event-domain Cognitive Model (ECM), Relevance Theory (RT) and the Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), is named Event-domain Relevance Blending Model (ERB for short) tentatively.Chapter Four concerns data analysis and discussion. We describing the corpus in detail and classifying Animal Xiehouyus according to its ECM structure into the following five types: B-A-B type, A-B (B-A) type, B/A type, A-A type and Miscellaneous type. And this chapter analyzes each type comprehensively with case study and statistical ratios.Chapter Five is used to deal with conclusion, findings and contributions of this study. Meanwhile, limitations of my paper and proposes suggestions for its further research are also pointed out.