A Cognitive Study Of Xieyin Parody In Chinese Commercial Advertisements From The Perspective Of Autonomy-Dependency Analysis Framework

Xieyin parody has come into widespread use in nowadays Chinese commercial advertisements thanks to its novel,vivid and economical way of delivering product's selling point and inciting the audience's purchase.Despite the fact that linguistic researches on this phenomenon have made fruitful progress from the perspective of rhetoric,psychology and pragmatics,whose focal points are definition,classification and expressive effects,there still needs a cognitive explanation to reveal how it is generated by the advertiser and how it is interpreted by the audience.Based on Professor Xu Shenghuan's Autonomy-Dependency Analysis Framework,this thesis has made a cognitive study on the generation and interpretation of xieyin parody in Chinese commercial advertisements.It has found that this phenomenon is not a mere rhetoric ornament but the result of cognitive process reflecting the way we perceive certain event represented by the corresponding expression.A combining action of both subjective and objective factors motivates its generation.The former refers to the advertiser's intentionality: intentional content and intentional attitude.The latter means the proximity/similarity relation concerning pronunciation and meaning aspect which exists in the present Chinese lexical system,which helps bridge xieyin parody expression,its corresponding conventional expression and theadvertiser's intentionality together.The generation mechanism of xieyin parody in Chinese commercial advertisements can be stated as: with the guidance of the advertiser's intentional attitude,the advertiser's implicit intentional content(the source)functioning as the autonomous element firstly drives the dependent element—a suitable conventional expression(the quasi element)by semantic proximity in psychology or semantic similarity relation.The derived quasi element in the first derivational process can coincide with the advertiser's highlighted intentional content or represent parts of the advertiser's intentional content.Then this quasi element functions as the autonomous element in the second derivational process.With the further guidance of the intentionality,this quasi element derives xieyin parody expression acting as the dependent element in the second derivational process as a result of pronunciation similarity relation.During the two-step derivational generation process,the autonomous element transmits its own meaning,usage,and characteristics to the dependent element by nipping-along.The interpretation process of xieyin parody in Chinese commercial advertisements is the retrieval process of its corresponding generation process along with the audience's abductive inference.For the audience,upon hearing a Chinese commercial advertisement expressed with xieyin parody,the corresponding quasi element will be activated in their mind because of pronunciation similarity.The quasi element facilitates the audience's searching for relevant information in their cognitive environment,especially takingadvantage of their encyclopedia information through proximity/similarity relation.In line with the nipping-along of the intentionality,the meaning of the quasi element is gradually weakened and the connotation of xieyin parody is highlighted so that the full comprehension of the source is reached.This thesis amplifies the research on xieyin parody.It proves that the feasible application of Autonomy-Dependency Analysis Framework proposed by Professor Xu Shenghuang offers a new perspective to study xieyin parody in Chinese commercial advertisements.Meanwhile,this study provides reference value to advertisers' creating influential xieyin parody advertisements,the audiences' interpreting xieyin parody advertisement,and also some further related studies on this topic.We also hope that this study can motivate more researches and even make great breakthrough on figure of speech from the cognitive perspective.