A Cognitive Study On Emergent Meaning Construction Of Noun-Noun Compounds

Compounding as an important means of word-formation plays a crucial role in vocabulary expansion. Noun-Noun compound is the most common type both in English and Chinese for its simplest structure. But its strong vitality and productivity have become a hot issue in current linguistic studies at home and abroad. The previous studies mainly focused on two perspectives: 1) the syntactic relationship between two constituents of a N-N compound, and 2) the semantic relationship between two constituents. However, neither of them can give a reasonable account on how the emergent meaning of N-N compound is produced, which shows the limitation of the traditional studies. With the development of cognitive science, linguists began to study the word meaning from the perspective of cognition. The theories proposed by Lakoff, Langacker and Fauconnier show, convincingly, that cognitive linguistics has great advantages in explaining the emergent meaning of N-N compound. This thesis, therefore, tries to explore the emergent meaning construction mechanism of N-N compound based on cognitive linguistics.For better illustrating the construction mechanism of emergent meaning, this thesis, theoretically, adapts the framework of Conceptual Integration Theory and takes LCCM theory as well as the Qualia Structure theory as complements. With the integration of the three theories, this thesis will propose a model to demonstrate the meaning construction process of N-N compound. The qualia structure embedded in the network of conceptual integration provides the background information for the lexical representatives of N-N compound in order to have a better description of semantic features, while the LCCM theory aims to elaborate the relationship between lexical concepts and the cognitive models of human beings. In addition, it also helps to account for the metaphorical and metonymic meaning of N-N compounds. With this modified model, this thesis classifies the N-N compounds into two categories according to the fact that whether metaphor and/or metonymy get involved in the meaning construction process. That is 1) non-metaphor-and metonymy-based N-N compounds; and 2) metaphor-and metonymy-based N-N compounds. Furthermore, this thesis also classifies the second type N-N compound into three categories in accordance with the fact that on which stage the metaphor and/or the metonymy get involved. That is a) N1 and/or N2 metaphor-and/or metonymy-based type; 2) the N-N compound as a whole is metaphorical and/or metonymic; 3) N1 and/or N2 metaphorical-and/or metonymic-based & the whole is also metaphorical and/or metonymic based. This thesis will illustrate the meaning construction process of N-N compounds in the form of case study.Through the detailed analyses of the typical examples, this thesis claims that 1) emergent meaning does not preexist in neither of the two constituents of the N-N compound, and in essence, it is the production of concepts integration; 2) the construction process of the emergent meaning is dynamic rather than static, human cognition plays an important role in the dynamic meaning construction process; 3) the fundamental reason for the production of emergent meaning lies in the activation of the secondary cognitive models of human beings. In different contexts, the secondary cognitive models being activated are varied, and people have different construals of the emergent meaning of one N-N compound.This study focuses on the cognitive study on the emergent meaning construction of N-N compounds, and it has provided some satisfactory answers to the puzzling and unsolved questions. However, it also has some room for further improvement in the future. Firstly, the examples chosen for the study are the most typical ones, whether the hybrid model is universally applicable or not needs to be further studied; Secondly, the classifications of the N-N compounds are relatively more general for the purpose that the meaning construction process can be analyzed more easily. There are still much more work to be done if the classifications of the N-N compounds are done more specifically.