A Construction Grammar Approach To Chinese Tautology "X+(adv)+Shi+X"

As a prevailing linguistic phenomenon, tautology is a special way ofexpression with a special construction. The word “tautology” is constituted by twoGreek morphemes:“tauto-” and “-logy”, which literally means the same speech.Syntactically speaking, Chinese tautology is a construction with “是” as its predicateand its subject and object being in an identical form. Semantically speaking, Chinesetautology is a kind of redundant expression with little information conveyed. Up tonow, previous scholars have approached Chinese Tautology Construction (CTC)through different perspectives, such as rhetorical, generative, pragmatic andcognitive perspectives. However, with authentic corpus, we note that previousresearches on the CTC have neither made detailed analysis of its form nor offered aconvincing interpreting mechanism to its meaning. The present study, thereupon,within the framework of Goldbergian construction grammar, is intended to provide aunified account of the properties of the construction and find out the interpretingmechanism of the meaning of the CTC.Based on the Chinese tautological sentences from the Contemporary ChineseCorpus (the CCC) and examples in illuminating periods from CNKI, this thesisanalyses the syntactic and semantic properties of the CTC comprehensively withinthe scope of construction grammar. Also, decategorization theory is applied to theinterpretation of the meaning of the CTC.After a long discussion and theoretical analysis, we finally come to thefollowing conclusion: the CTC is a construction in that several aspects of themeaning of the CTC and of its form are not generally predictable from itsconstituents or from other established constructions. The CTC takes the form of “X+(adv)+是+X” and conveys the meaning that it conceals the relationship between Xand its contrasting elements and highlights their distinctions. The generalconstruction, together with its five subconstructions constitutes a polysemous meaning network. The process of the interpretation of the meaning of the CTC isactually a process in which the object of the CTC loses the features of its originalgrammatical category and gains the features of new grammatical category with theassistance of construction coercion and the context where the CTC appears.