A Study Of The Understanding Mechanism Of Chinese Cants

A Cant is the jargon, lingo, argot of a group, often implying its use to exclude or misleadpeople outside the group. It is a very interesting, attractive field as well as a mental andcognitive phenomenon, which is worthy of being explored. This paper studies Chinese cantswhich have a long history. Chinese cants have their distinctive attractions which impelscholars to study them. There are many researches on cants from different disciplines andperspectives. Moreover, they have obtained some research findings which lay solidfoundations for this research. Nonetheless, these researches mainly focus on cant’s definitions,classifications, functions, characteristics. Up to now, there are few studies on theunderstanding mechanism of them. As hearers, when we know the implicit meaning of thecant, we all have the experience of being confused, because there are many differencesbetween the explicit meaning and the implicit meaning of it. In terms of such kind ofinteresting and confusing linguistic phenomenon, the following questions arise: What’s therelationship between the explicit meaning and the implicit meaning of the Chinese cant? Howdo we understand Chinese cants? There are few researches on these aspects.This paper attempts to work out the understanding mechanism of Chinese cants from theperspective of cognitive linguistics. The aim of this paper is to set up a workable analyticalframework for the understanding of Chinese cants. It analyzes a considerable quantity of datafrom Chinese dictionaries, as well as books about linguistics and Chinese cants. This studymainly analyzes the understanding mechanism of Chinese cants by applying the Inheritanceof Denotation/Connotation Theory proposed by Xu Shenghuan.The major findings are as follows:(1) A Chinese cant has two kinds of meaning: the explicit meaning and the implicit meaning. They are in the relationship of similarity or proximity; moreover, the explicitmeaning is used to substitute the implicit meaning in the specific context. The implicitmeaning is understood by means of inference of the explicit meaning. The inferring process isthe inheritance of connotation and denotation in the type hierarchy structure by using thestereotypical relations with two dimensions of similarity/proximity.(2) A Chinese cant may have many different explicit meanings, which are denotationalmeanings and connotational meanings. These different meanings have their own connotationsas well as type hierarchy structures, in which the inheritances of connotations and denotationswill not stop until the denotations/connotations relating to the implicit meanings are found.The implicit meaning of a Chinese cant may be the denotation/connotation of one typehierarchy structure or combined denotations/connotations of different type hierarchystructures.(3) Some Chinese cants are similar to the riddles of Chinese characters. They arecommon and easy to understand, therefore, they are often thought of as ordinary language,rather than Chinese cants. Few people have studied the understanding mechanism of theseChinese cants. Through the analyses of them, the paper finds that their understandingprocesses make no differences to other Chinese cants.