Chinese Phonological Parody: Approached From Construction Grammar

Chinese phonological parody widely exists in modern mandarine. In phonologicalparody, some parodistic texts are grammatical; their structural forms abide by languagegeneral generating rules. For examples:“Renren wei qian”(任人唯“�'�”),. However,there are also parodistic texts whose syntax and semantics are totally beyond people’sgeneral cognitive rules. Such as “Suan ni hen”(“�'�”你狠). Such kind of parodistictexts changed conventional structural matching and conventional semantic matching.This thesis focuses on the understanding of the structure and semantics and generativemechanism of Chinese phonological parody under the theoretic framework ofConstruction Grammar.In people’s cognitive domain, the original texts are fixed pet phrases, terms andidioms which belong to the category of Construction. Gestalt can exert on anydistorting elements entered in the construction to accord with the construction, whichmakes the extra-grammatical structure be grammatical.Parodistic texts’ generation is based on original texts, not to change original texts’structural form or semantics. Original texts attached to speech sound exert onparodistic texts as a whole, and coexist with parodistic texts. Parodistic word bears itsown meaning. Construction owns independent meaning, which can’t be changed evenif the language units are altered, which can be passed to its instance by inheritance.Therefore, the semantics of parodistic texts integrate constructional meaning oforiginal texts and the meaning of parodistic word, to obtain semantic added value.Thus, people can temporally accept such kind of parodistic texts syntactically andsemantically.Combing language general generating rules with CxG can explain phonologicalparody better. The similarities in phone, semantics or context, of external world canactivate some fixed expressions and their related information in our known world.Substituting some elements of original texts with homophones on the base of knowninformation, and then new expressions known called parodistic texts are created whichcan fill in language slot.