| With the rapid development of Internet,netspeak,as an emerging linguistic form,has been widely spread and has penetrated into every aspect of people's life.Netspeak covers many different types of expressions and is presented in various forms.It not only attracts the wide attention of different classes in society but also the interest of scholars from different fields.As a new kind of a language phenomenon in netspeak,network construction develops at a high speed and has been imitated and applied to a variety of situations by netizens.When a kind of language phenomenon emerges and grows quite rapidly,it certainly reflects the cognitive law and the cognitive psychology on language.This paper takes one of the“Top Ten Catchwords in 2016”released by Excessive Wording,“?????X”construction as the research subject.By collecting 166 examples of this constructionfrom different mainstream websites as a small-scale data,the thesis discusses the meaning of its parts,the whole constructional meaning and syntactic features of this construction.Based on figure-ground and conceptual blending theory,the thesis investigates the cognitive motivation behind the construction.The study shows that,firstly,based on the classification of the language materials,the variable“X”in the construction“?????X”has the highest frequency by acting as disyllable and the lowest frequency by acting as monosyllable.Therefore,in terms of pragmatic usage,the disyllable type of the construction is mostly used,which becomes the prototypical use of“?????X”.However,according to its information distribution,the variable“X”always shows the highest prominence.Secondly,at the syntactic level,“?????X”can act as the subject,adverbial,complement,attribute and independent clause in a sentence.As an independent clause,this construction has the highest degree of prominence and is mostly used in sentences.In the figure-ground relationship,the variable serves as the figure and is easy to be located.Hence,it would take less cognitive effort to understand the construction.In the four types of variable,the monosyllable,disyllable and trisyllable possess higher degree of prominence than polysyllable,thus the total number of the former three types of variable far outweigh the number of polysyllable.Thirdly,at the semantic level,“?????X”has its prototypical meaning and extensional meaning.The prototypical meaning is that actions are taken immediately when two persons cannot agree on something,which is highly contextualized and event-based.The semantic meaning of the construction changes with the extension of its practical use.The event-based feature is weakened,the meaning changes into doing something without any expectation and the tendency to do something.Conceptual blending plays a crucial role in the online meaning construction process of“?????X”and can be applied to the semantic analysis of this contextualized and event-based language phenomenon.The differences between prototypical meaning and extensional meaning of the construction can reveal the cognitive motivation behind“?????X”construction.This thesis is a tentative study of Chinese network construction.It analyzes the semantic meaning of the construction“?????X”under the guidance of conceptual blending theory and the characteristics of the construction by applying figure ground theory,which expands the research scope of figure ground theory as well as the cognitive understanding of netspeak.It is hoped that through this study,the thesis will enrich the researches of Chinese netspeak and provide a relatively scientific explanation for the forming and development of netspeak. |
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