The Cognitive Mechanism Of The Generation And Construal Of Xiehouyu

Xiehouyu is a pervasive language phenomenon with distinct Chinese cultural characteristics (see Wen Duanzheng, Zhou Jan, 2000). Traditionally classified, the former part of xiehouyu could be named as an allusive expression which resembles the face of a riddle,whereas the latter part seems to be the answer to the riddle, which is the intended meaning that Xiehouyu expresses.During recent decades, modern linguists, semanticists, cognitive semanticists and cognitive pragmatists in particular, were probing into this old issue. Since 1920,plenty of studies on Xiehouyu have been conducted. However, the previous studies are mainly carried out from the perspective of culture,rhetoric,syntax and semantics,dwelling on the argumentation of the origin,denomination, categorization, structure, rhetoric functions etc. Few researches have done from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, let alone Mental Models theory. For this reason, the paper devotes to exploring this ancient Chinese pragmatic phenomenon from a quite different view.By virtue of the inadequacy of the previous studies, the objective of this paper is to make a tentative exploration on the underlying cognitive mechanism of the generation and construal of XHYs. In terms of utterance expression, the fundamental characteristics of a whole XHY is: the former part is cognitively named as the trigger of the idea intended(本意触发体), and the latter part is the idea intended (本意本体)(Zou chunling, 2009a). The analysis on their relationship is supposed to be classified as two parts: 1) how the speaker derives the introductory part (dependency) from the explanatory part (autonomy); 2) how the listener understands the whole intended meaning with the explicature and implicature expression combined.Our key theoretical goal is to set up a workable analytical framework to explain the cognitive motivation of language use, so this paper holds the cog-pragmatic perspective, following three hypotheses for cognitive pragmatics.With the aim to clarify the underlying cognitive motivation, this paper employs a qualitative method including abduction inference paradigm in our study backed by a considerable quantity of corpus data from some Chinese literary works, authoritative dictionaries as well as some daily conversations.The theoretical framework in this research includes: Mental Model-Based Pragmatic Reasoning put forward by Xu Shenghuan (2007b), which is deemed as a dynamic and hierarchical system including Mental Models, Intentionality Hypothesis, Explicit-Implicit Expression Hypothesis and Stereotypical Relations Hypothesis, as the analyzing tools. It mainly consists of the Autonomy-Dependency Alignment Analytical Framework for the interpretation of language generation and the Explicature-Implicature Expression Reasoning Framework for the interpretation of language construal, with each being respectively responsible for the comprehensive account of Xiehouyu as a cog-pragmatic phenomenon. the present static study of xiehouyu.