| Popular structures draw scholars’ attention because of their rich expression and lasting vitality, so “zhongguoshi X”(zhongguoshiguomalu) comes into their notice undoubtedly and deserves a careful research as a new construction. The construction first appears in the TV series Chinese Style Divorce which means “exposing or praising the events or actions with Chinese characters” The previous studies are all devoted to description and explanation of the lexical characters and semantic changes of the construction “zhongguoshi X” with social development and inner mentality of people from social and cultural perspectives. However, there are no papers discussing “zhongguoshi X” construction systematically from the perspective of cognitive linguistics including construction grammar, let alone any theoretical framework and corpus analysis and discussion. Base on cognitive linguistics, this thesis regards the popular stucture “zhongguoshi X” as a construction and establishes a CEI cognitive model which is an integration of construction coercion, ECM and construction multiple inheritance to study the cognitive mechanism and the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of this construction. At the same time, this thesis collects 238 items from People’s net, Xinhua net and Chinaso net exhaustively to form a closed corpus for both quantitative and qualitative analyses.There are five chapters in this thesis, and the main ideas are as follows:Chapter One makes a brief introduction to the motivation, objectives, methodology and data collection as well as layout of this thesis.Chapter Two reexamines previous studies about this construction and unveils the gaps of those researches.Chapter Three proposes a new cognitive model CEI by integrating construction coercion, ECM and construction multiple inheritance to explain the cognitive mechanism of “zhongguoshi X”.Chapter Four is based on data description and gives a detailed analysis of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features using CEI with the aid of related data. The results are as follows:Syntactically, “X” in the “zhongguoshi X” construction can be uni-syllable, bi-syllable, multi-syllable, letter, or combination of number and letter. Construction with bi-syllable has the largest proportion of 71.01%. The construction partially inherits the information from four superordinate constructions: subject-predicate construction, construction of adverbial in advance, construction of omitting subject, and construction of affirmative sentence.Semantically, the “zhongguoshi X” construction has commendatory sense, derogatory sense or co-existence of commendatory sense and derogatory sense. Construction with derogatory sense accounts for 68.1% and that describing the social life has the largest proportion of 34.5%. The detailed explanation and description will be shown in the thesis.Pragmatically, the “zhongguoshi X” construction has the following pragmatic features: conciseness, productivity, novelty and irony.Chapter Five gives a conclusion of the whole paper and summarizes the contributions made by this study. The main contributions of the study lie in:Firstly, this thesis points out the inadequacies of the construction coercion theory, ECM and construction multiple inheritance theory and establishes CEI model to explain the cognitive mechanism of this construction and analyzes the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features.Secondly, this thesis, for the first time, regards “zhongguoshi X” as a construction and analyzes it from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and construction grammar.Thirdly, a closed corpus is established for the first time and we give a data analysis and classification of this construction with the aid of reliable data.Finally, this chapter points out limitations of this study and proposes suggestions for further research. |
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