A Cognitive Mechanism Study Of XHYs

Chinese XieHouyus (henceforth, XHYs) is one kind of the Chinese traditional folklanguages which are produced by the laboring people in their social practice and experience.XHYs are used broadly both in people’s daily communication and in the literary works. Theirunique forms and contents are becoming more and more perfect with the development of thesociety. And they carry profound cultural elements, unique ethnic characteristics, and specialcustoms, which make XHYs the live fossil of Chinese culture by people. What’s more, XHYshave attracted lots of scholars’ attention and interest to study, for their brief form, vivid image,rich meanings and the rhetorical effects such as humor, sarcasm and so on. However, most ofthe researches are descriptive study, like studying the origin, definition, classification and therhetorical effects at first. With the occurrence and development of cognitive linguistics,scholars have turned to the explanatory studies to explore the generation and construalmechanisms with the relevance theory, conceptual integration theory andautonomy-dependency perspective and so on. But these theories have weakness in revealingthe essence of the relationship between the former parts and the latter parts in XHYs.In order to deal with it, based on the data collected from the dictionary of XHYs andadopting the qualitative method, this thesis attempts to explore the generation and theconstrual mechanisms of XHYs and the essence of the relationship between the former partsand the latter parts from the perspective of denotation/connotation inheritance which is putforward by Xu Shenghuan. It involves some important concepts, such as the stereotypicalrelation, two dimensions of proximity/similarity, type hierarchy structure, denotation andconnotation. Through the analysis, several findings are drawn as follows:(1) As a kind of substitution utterance, XHYs’ real meanings are concealed in the concrete contexts. But they share the proximity/similarity relationship in terms of thedenotation or connotation, according to which we can establish the corresponding typehierarchy structures. And in turn, the type hierarchy structures can show thedenotation/connotation inheritance among them.(2) Generally speaking, XHYs are composed by two parts, the former parts and the latterparts, whether they being metaphorical XHYs without homophones or metaphorical XHYswith homophones. The two parts can also establish the type hierarchy structure, which canshow the denotation/connotation inheritance between the two parts. Thus, the essence of therelationship between the former parts and the latter parts is the denotation/connotationinheritance.(3) In the actual usage of XHYs, the relationship among the contexts’ meaning, theformer parts and the latter parts in XHYs represents their denotation/connotation inheritance.