| The pattern “Bu X Bu Y” is widely used in practical language,and the research on this structure is also a popular research hotspot in Chinese academic field.In modern Chinese,negative category has always occupied an important position in people's cognitive world,and the phenomenon that the negative adverbs are used alternately within a construction leads to a special research value of it.At the same time,this construction has a rich meaning with a concise form and high production.Based on the research background,this thesis puts forward the following research questions.(1)How is the construction meaning of this construction formed and constructed?(2)What syntactic and pragmatic functions does the construction have?(3)What is the cognitive motivation of the negative tendency of this constructive?Based on the theory of construction grammar and the theory of domain,this study intends to adopt the qualitative research method assisted by quantitative research method and X&Y in this structure will be limited to monosyllabic verbs,adjectives,and nouns when they are antonyms or opposite in pairs,such as“????”(It means a person is neither dead nor alive.),“????”(It means the temperature is neither hot nor cold.),“????”(It means something is neither soft nor hard.),etc.Three conclusions are drawn from the present study:(1)This thesis discusses the construction meaning from the perspective of conceptual domain in cognitive linguistics.The constructional meanings of “Bu X Bu Y” could be divided into two types:(i)the conceptual domains of antonyms or opposites in pairs could be divided into two and there is no intermediate state in a single conceptual domain.After the negation on the two opposing categories of such single conceptual domain,it cannot be classified into any category and so it will be embarrassed.Therefore,the construction of this kind refers to an embarrassing situation and the semantic is absolutely negative;(ii)the conceptual domain of antonyms or opposites in pairs is a continuum which cannot be divided and there is an intermediate state in this single conceptual domain.The negation on the two ends of this conceptual domain represents an ideal and satisfied intermediate state.And the cognitive prominence plays an important role in construction structuring which contains two kinds--the prominence in ultimate words and the prominence in the basic domains.(2)The language unit generated by “Bu X Bu Y” construction has the same status as words and phrases and it is a complete lexical unit.It can act as predicate,object,attribute,adverbial and complement in a sentence.At the same time,this construction has a high frequency in actual language usage,which has the characteristics of high productivity and openness,and it also has the unique pragmatic values which cannot be replaced by other constructions.(3)It is found that the same structure should have the positive,negative and neutral these three kinds of semantic colors through data analysis.And the negative semantic makes up a considerable proportion of the whole meaning.In especial,“Bu X Bu Y” this construction which should represent positive meaning turns to be negative in certain context.So,this paper mainly probes into the cognitive motivations that lead to the negative tendency of this construction.And it is found that this is related to the negation word “Bu”.Under the induction of “Bu”,it can be confirmed that the semantic meaning of the construction has changed from positive into negative through the cognitive psychological mechanism--pragmatic inference.Its semantic change happened mainly because of the subjectivisation of this construction which is represented by the grammaticalized “Bu”.In this situation,the semantic of “Bu” which represents objective negation originally is weakened to express subjective construal and leads to the semantic imbalance between X and Y in different contexts,so,eventually the meaning of this construction turns to be negative. |
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