Text-based Cognitive Study Of Chinese "Mei" Existential Construction

Guided by the basic assumptions of cognitive semantics,this dissertation aims to study a subtype of Chinese "you" existential constructions,i.e.the negative form of Chinese "you"existential construction with the form of "NP1+ mei(you)+ NP2" through investigating the cognitive mechanism of the negation of "NP2",the textual coherence function of Chinese"mei" existential construction and the importance of contexts.Based on Fillmore's Frame Semantic theory and Xu Shenghuan's Stereotypical Relation theory,the semantic analysis of Chinese "mei" existential construction aims to figure out the regular associations between the semantic choice of "NP2" and certain event semantic elements in order to investigate the connections between the static existential construction with "mei" and specific frames.This dissertation adopts qualitative methods for explanations which are based on adequate instantiations with quantitative analysis of this construction collected from the online Corpus of Modern Chinese developed by Beijing University.The existential constructions have attracted linguists' and scholars' great attention because of their ubiquity in almost every language.Since the 1950s,Chinese existential constructions have gradually drawn the attention of many Chinese scholars who have adopted various theories and research methods with the purpose of studying different issues concerning existential constructions.According to the law of the unity of opposites,the concept of "existence" must have two states:existence and non-existence,so there must be positive existential constructions and negative existential constructions.As has been verified.Chinese "you" existential construction is the prototype of all the Chinese existential constructions while previous researches seldom focused on its negative form.Therefore,this dissertation only selects the Chinese "mei”existential construction as the research object in consideration of its research profundity and the limited space here.First of all,Chinese "mei" existential construction is introduced and classified in this study,then the syntactic environment of this construction is taken as the background for the cognitive analysis of how the "NP2" is negated.Then the construction is put into the dynamic context in order to further dig out the cognitive mechanism for the negation of "NP2",and the textual coherence function of this construction is manifested at the same time.After a thorough retrieval and qualitative analysis of all the "mei" existential sentences from the selected online Corpus,this dissertation holds that this construction is not simply to deny the existence of something or the introduction of a new topic,but to highlight the anti-expectation of something presupposed in our mind or to contrast with another scene or objective reality,which helps interpreters further understand the old topic and achieve textual coherence.Besides,this dissertation reveals the importance of context in Cognitive Linguistics,revealing that construction study cannot neglect the influence of context,which further confirms that Cognitive Linguistics must value the importance of context.In Cognitive Linguistics,the concept of context does not simply refer to the traditional "context in pragmatics";it is more of a mental representation.At last,a new explanation of context in Cognitive Linguistics is attempted in this study.