Riddling--A Word Play In Chinese Civilization

This thesis, entitled "Riddling----- A Word Play In ChineseCivilization", intends to explore riddles as a word play. "Playing with words is a universal human activity, but it is particularly noticeable in the way literate societies have devised word games, based largely on the written language. People delight in pulling words apart, and reconstituting them in a novel guise, arranging them into clever patterns, finding hidden meaning inside them, and trying to use them according to specially invented rules."1There are many kinds of word play beside riddles, for example, puzzles, jokes, word- squares, crosswords, puns, anagrams, palindromes, tongue twisters, and rebuses. I would like to turn to differentiate them as an introduction to the riddles.Though the varieties of language games or word play are many, I choose to focus on riddles. And linguistic analysis upon relationship between Chinese script and riddling and exploration of its use in Chinese classical literary works-< A Dream of Red Chamber> are the core of my study.Because riddling is an international genre, and is of oral tradition prevalent in most cultures. And a search through the riddles filled me with great surprise and puzzle, because the study on the riddles is quite rare, hardly any attention has been given to the riddle as a distinctive mode of expression and relating. Why is it that the riddle has been overlooked and neglected in the search of the inner life? And I do believe that the riddles in the < A Dream of Red Mansion> are symbolic and are closely related to the fate of the royal family and the youth. And Ithink when the riddles are interwoven with the plot of the story, it becomes very hard to separate them from the literature work, which are enriched by the riddling.In fact, as an oral genre, riddles can be studied in a different aspect, namely, the cognitive aspect, that is to find the relationship between two parties, the riddler and the riddlee; rhetoric techniques applied and linguistic ambiguity in riddling.It is hard to obtain a thorough understanding of riddling in my paper. As an important element in international culture, it's role in expressing our inner mind needs to be assessed and studied.