The Structuring And Meaning Of Yi X Yi Y Pattern-A Cognitive Perspective

yi X yi Y pattern, a typically fixed Chinese lexical formation, has long been recognized as one of the most widely distributed phrasal patterns in Chinese. The matter has been repeatedly addressed by scholars amply focusing on formal descriptions and general classifications rather than detailed interpretation of the truly underlying motivating factors. The neglect of the triggering factors not only leads to the absense of explicating the process of meaning construction and the interrelationships between different instances of yi X yi Y, but also fails to explain the different degrees of lexicalization and predict its regularity of proliferation.Due to the unique embodiment nature of cognitive linguistics, it is widely recognized as an effective means of resolving many pitfalls in the purview of traditional formal linguistic paradigms, which make it well acknowledged not only in the realm of linguistics but other interdisciplinary areas as well. This thesis attempts to provide a tentative interpretation of yi X yi Y pattern from cognitive perspective:1. to implement Croft's (2001) method of classifying parts of speech in Radical Construction Grammar (RCG) in the hope of reclassifying the grammatical categories of Xs and Ys in yi X yi Y pattern and categorizing the yi X yi Y pattern accordingly;2. to make a detailed semantic analysis of yi X yi Y pattern with the aim to testify the decisive nature of metonymy in the meaning construction of yi X yi Y pattern, especially the PART FOR WHOLE metonymy;3. to identify the interrelationships among different instances of yi X yi Y pattern, which is assumed to be a dynamic continuum with instances in different stages of lexicalization, thus lead to the verification of the Semantic Map Connectivity Hypothesis proposed by Croft (2001);4. to explore the construction meaning of yi X yi Y pattern with reference to those typical syntactic category only due to the limited space and various degrees and complex nature of grammaticalization represented in yi X yi Y instances;5. to explicate the cognitive constrains on the ordering of Xs and Ys in light of cognitive iconicity. The ordering of Xs and Ys is relatively fixed, following people's cognitive order, especially the sequence iconicity, including temporal sequence, spatial relations, sequence of markedness (semantic markedness and tone markedness), the Pollyanna Effect and cultural thoughts.