Cognitive Analyses Of Chinese Specific Interrogative Talking Pair Constructions

Chinese specific interrogative talking pair constructions play a significant role in people's daily conversations.Chinese linguists have studied the interrogative words and questions and a lot of achievements have been gained,but most of the researches are studied from the perspectives of Transformational-Generative Grammar or Functional grammar,and the researches on the interrogative talking pair constructions as a whole are rare.Therefore,the present study is conducted from the perspective of the Cognitive Linguistics by applying Event-domain Cognitive Model and Schema-Instance theories,based on 821 specific interrogative talking pair constructions collected from the TV series Ode to Joy.The author of this thesis makes a qualitative and quantitative analysis of their features at three levels,i.e.,syntactic,semantic and pragmatic levels.The findings are:(1)In terms of the data collected,in Chinese Question-Answer conversations,the frequency of“zen me”(??)and“shen me”(??)is 43.24%and 35.20%respectively,and this is higher than the other three interrogative words“wei shen me”(???),“na er”(??)and“shui”(?).This is just in accordance with the Action and Being in an EVENT,which shows that the characters in this TV series pay more attention to these two core elements of an EVENT;(2)From syntactic perspective,the author analyzes the specific interrogative talking pairs from two aspects:SR on structural level and SR in degree of association.The former can be classified into word and phrase level,single sentence level and sentence group level,accounting for 4.38%,23.39%and 72.23%respectively.And the latter can be classified into complete resonance,partial resonance and zero resonance,the percentages of which are 47.26%,39.46%and 13.28%.It can be seen that the frequency of sentence group level and complete resonance is the highest which shows that the characters in this TV series tend to use more than one sentence to answer the question and at the same time,the structure of the answer and question is basically the same;(3)From semantic perspective,the phenomenon of semantic resonance can be classified into complete,partial,redundant,zero and multiple resonance.Complete resonance which accounts for42.75%is mostly used to respond the speaker.And the percentage of the rest is 16.33%,23.87%,17.05%and 38.86%respectively;(4)From pragmatic perspective,the hearer,based on his interpersonal relationship with the speaker and their communication situation,will perform three different cooperative policies:complete cooperation,partial cooperation and non-cooperation,and the percentages of which are 71.62%,17.66%and 10.72%.Clearly,full cooperation takes up the highest percentage,showing that the characters in this TV series prefer to cooperate with each other in conversations.This thesis implicates that the Chinese specific interrogative talking pairs should better be studied as a whole,i.e.a construction,instead of a single word or isolated sentences,which can reveal the cognitive mechanisms behind the dialogues.