A Comparative Study Of Verb Reduplication AABB And ABAB In Modern Chinese From The Cognitive Perspective

Verb reduplication, which is widely accepted and used as a grammar method inthe literary works and daily communication, has attracting more and more attentionfrom linguists, who mainly concentrate on the general description of grammaticaland syntactic features and have fierce arguments about its semantic features.Although some have studied the cognitive mechanism from the perspective ofcognitive linguistics, it needs further study in width and depth with the lack of asystematic and reasonable account and as well as authoritative and systematicsupport of data. Furthermore, a systematically contrastive study of verb reduplicationAABB and reduplication ABAB with the adoption of cognitive theory is still a sheerblank with regard to the various forms of verb reduplication and limited concern onthe type of verb reduplication respectively.This thesis, based on the data, first summarizes the amount and percentage of theverb reduplication AABB and verb reduplication ABAB independently and finds thatthe occurrence of the two forms are closely related the frequency of use byconducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data collected from the Syllabus of the Graded Vocabulary of HSK and the Chinese ContemporaryDictionary(6thedition) by the virtue of the corpus of the Center for ChineseLinguistics PKU(CCL for short), then makes a systematic comparison of verbreduplication AABB and ABAB from the semantic and pragmatic approach and theresults are shown as follows:(1) Some verbs semantically lose the prototypical meaning with the addition ofgeneralized and abstract meaning gradually which suggest verb reduplication AABBforms a continuum from full verb to adjective, while ABAB does not involve thisprocess.(2) The decategorization theory is adopted to account for the change of semanticfeatures, and the change of syntactic features, which developed form full verb toadjective in path. As the semantic analysis is largely depend on the cognitive strategyin cognitive processing, the cognitive processing of verb reduplication AABBinvolves summary scanning, which leads to the salient of the whole entity, whilecognitive processing of verb reduplication ABAB involves sequential scanning,which results in the emphasis on the dynamic movement of action A and action B.(3) Pragmatically, verb reduplication AABB shows a sense of vividness, simplicity in language and beauty in rhyme, while verb reduplication ABABexpresses a kind of politeness in communication.(4) A verb can be allowed to enter the verb reduplication AABB and ABAB islargely depends on its inner word formation and the emotional coloring.The contrastive exploration of verb reduplication AABB and ABAB with theadoption of the cognitive theories is of great theoretical significance and researchvalue, which can not only offer a better understanding of the two forms and shedlight on the teaching of Chinese language, but also help the beginners and those whostudy Chinese as a second language to master the internal rule of Chinese languageand accelerate the language acquisition.