The Study On Productive Mechanism Of Chinese Character Riddles From The Perspective Of Autonomy-dependency Framework

The objective of this thesis is to make a tentative explanation of the productive mechanism of one of the specific types of Chinese character riddles from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.The existing literature we can find at present is mainly concerning the riddles from the perspective of social encyclopedia, folklore and civilization. Most of the Chinese riddle scholars investigate them about the origin, history, development, classification, techniques of guessing and creating riddles. Looking through the previous literature, we can find that there are few experts studying riddles and scarce books or papers concerning the theoretical aspects of riddles. With regard to cognitive linguistics, almost no scholar takes Chinese character riddles as data or the research target. So in this dissertation, we mainly focus on the productive mechanism of Chinese character riddles from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.In order to acquire a rational explanation of the productive mechanism of riddles, we adopt the following three theories: (1) principles of Gestalt psychology, (2) Mental-Model based research paradigm and (3) the theory of type-hierarchy structure. These form our basis of theoretical framework. The reasoning way we put in this dissertation is abduction and furthermore, the result we obtain is tentative.By applying the relevant theories to our present dissertation, we can get the possible process of riddle production as follows:(1) As the autonomous element, a riddle answer can be divided into two or more parts by splitting its radical and indexing component and the theory supporting its way of splitting is the theory of Gestalt Psychology;(2) As "good figures", these splitting parts have their own connotation and denotations. The former is the fact that they can be viewed as the single words or the radical/indexing components of many other characters. The latter are the specific words containing them; (3) According to the theory of type-hierarchy structure, the denotations containing these parts can be in the same level of category, with regard to the principle of similarity;(4) Taking the principles put forward by the previous scholars into account, i.e. riddle image should be influent and meaningful, we combine the denotations of each part of the specific words together, may or may not with the assistance of triggers (触机).By analyzing the possible process of the production of Chinese character riddles, we finally come to the following two major findings:(1) In this paper, the answer, part is the manifestation of autonomous element and reflects the producers' communicative intentionality, because it firstly forms in the creators' mind and is relatively concrete and direct. Autonomous element also cannot be seen or touched, and it corresponds to the implicit expression. The image part, on the contrary, is the dependent element, and it is always represented as an actual expression, character, number or figure, etc... The existence of riddle image totally depends on that of the answer part. The image is the explicit expression. They can also be mutually transformed.(2) In accordance with the type-hierarchy structure, Chinese character is a system and can be viewed as TyH (e). As for the specific Chinese character, one of its connotations is that it can be the single word or the radical/indexing component of many other characters. So we can say that this character can have more than one denotation containing the part and every character containing this part can be viewed as possessing the feature of similarity. These words bearing this kind of similarity can be in the same level of category.In conclusion, the main significance of this paper is not to introduce the techniques of guessing riddles or to develop the new manners of creation, but to make a tentative explanation of the productive mechanism of Chinese character riddles. It is also the application of the theory of cognitive linguistics to a new language phenomenon. Besides, there are also some limitations in this paper, i.e. abductive reasoning is the way to give a tentative explanation to the already happened events, so it needs to be examined further; our present research mainly concentrates on the data of Chinese character riddles, so whether the mechanism we get from the analysis can apply to other linguistic phenomena and other types of riddles needs to be examined in the future.