A Study Of Production Mechanism Of Chinese Poem Blendings: An Autonomy-dependency Perspective

This thesis is mainly concerned with the generation of the Chinese poem blending withinthe Autonomy-Dependency Analysis Framework. With the wide spread of the computers andthe development of the internet, people are increasingly reliable on the internet through whichthey get information and keep contact with the world, whereas none of human’s activities canbe separated from the language, which brings about a great amount of netspeak. People usesuch kind of unique language to communicate, while netspeak is subject to constant changesat the same time, during which process a new kind of netspeak comes into being, namely, theChinese poem blending. It is a newly-appeared linguistic phenomenon on the internet whichgroups the irrelated lines from different Chinese classic poems of or combines the lines fromChinese classic poems with the modern made-up lines so that it can build a new meaning orbe used to spoof the netizen’s professions or situations. This linguistic phenomenon is verypopular among the netizens, but has not aroused much interest in the linguistic field yet. Thereare few relevant articles which are only general studies and none of them concern thegenerating mechanism of the Chinese poem blending.This thesis attempts to provide a reasonable explanation for the productive process of theChinese poem blending within Professor Xu Shenghuan’s Autonomy-Dependency AnalysisFramework from the cognitive perspective. The Autonomy-Dependency Analysis Frameworkholds “the production of utterance is geared by the intentional contents in the speaker’s mind,which serves as the autonomy during the production and gives derivation to the dependencywhich is converted as the utterance. The derivation, constrained by the speaker’scommunication intentionality, is realized through making use of contiguity and proximity”(徐盛桓,2007). This theory has a strong explanative power and can be used to analyze the generative mechanism of the Chinese poem blending. The thesis argues that the derivation ofthe Chinese poem blending is motivated by the intentionality in the netizen’s mind, that is, theautonomous element. The reason that the Chinese poem blending can convey netizen’sintentionality lies in the fact that it has the relation of proximity/similarity with the meaning itcan convey. The autonomous element derives the Chinese poem blending through the relationof proximity/similarity and by the means of nipping-along. This is the generative mechanismof the Chinese poem blending in this thesis.