A Cognitive Study Of Chinese Xiehouyu Within The BR Model

Xiehouyu is a unique language form and language phenomenon in Chinese,which has reflected the wisdom of Chinese labor people and their emotion towardlife and has been regarded as the live fossil of Chinese language. For a long period,Xiehouyu has drawn great attention of scholars. A lot of studies have been made andgreat achievement has been attained. The early studies mainly focus on thediscussion of its definition, origin, rhetorical function and meaning. Recently,scholars start to study it from the perspective of semantics, pragmatics and cognitivelinguistics. However, the previous studies are limited, which cannot make a goodexplanation of the construal mechanism of Xiehouyu.Based on the previous study, the present study tries to build a new analyticalmodel “BR model” by combining “conceptual blending theory” and “mental-basedpragmatic reasoning theory”. On the basis of the new model, Xiehouyu will beclassified into five types and their construal mechanism will be analyzed as casestudy.According to the analysis of five different types of Xiehouyu by “BR model”,the construal mechanism of Xiehouyu can be described as follows (1) Xiehouyu is thecombination of explicit expression which is expressed by the former part ofXiehouyu and implicit expression expressed by the latter part of Xiehouyu. Thegeneral interpretation of Xiehouyu is to infer the implicit expression from the explicitexpression and then the implicit expression can complement and elucidate theexplicit expression to reach the whole interpretation of Xiehouyu.(2) How the explicitexpression infers the implicit expression is the process of conceptual blending. In theprocess of blending, the intentionality is considered as the principle of selectiveprojection. Under the guidance of it, the elements which are related to the implicitexpression will be projected to the blend space while other elements which do notcontribution to the implicit expression will be ignored.(3) The emergent structure is the implicit expression which will complement or elucidate the explicit expression toreach the whole interpretation of Xiehouyu.