A Cognitive Study Of EAT Formal Unit Collocations In Chinese Dialects

The study on the formal unit ? and its collocations has always been noticed by Chinese scholars.We find that the previous studies generally focus on the formal unit ? and its collocations in Putonghua:on the one hand,they approach the grammatical structures,the semantic structures,the social and cultural features of the ? collocations from the perspective of traditional linguistics;on the other hand,they attempt to explain the complicate semantic relations of the ? itself or its collocations from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,especially for its atypical collocations.On the whole,the previous studies are very colorful and fruitful,which provides an important foundation for our further research.However,most of them lay emphasis on the semantic understanding of the ? collocations and pay little attention to the generation of the ? collocations.Besides,the collocations of these formal units like ?,?,?,? used to represent the concept of EAT in Chinese dialects are seldom involved in the previous studies.The research object of this thesis is the collocations of the formal units used to represent the concept of EAT(namely,the EAT formal unit collocations)in Mandarin dialect,Wu dialect and Min dialect from 30 regional dialects of The Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects,which is edited by Mr.Li Rong.Adopting comparative and qualitative method,based on the semantic understanding of the EAT formal unit collocations,this thesis will pay much attention to the generation of the EAT formal unit collocations and use the theory of linguistic unit concept frame,the theory of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy to compare the differences among the EAT formal unit collocations in Chinese dialects and to explore their collocation mechanisms.Specifically,after classifying the EAT formal unit collocations in Chinese dialects,this thesis will probe into the differences among the EAT formal unit collocations through cross-dialect and intra-dialect comparison,and then try to explore the collocation mechanisms of the EAT formal unit collocations in Chinese dialects and forecast the potential effects that they may have on the EAT formal unit collocations in Putonghua.There are three major findings in this thesis:(1)The four formal units ?,?,?,? are generally used to represent the concept of EAT in Chinese dialects and their distribution has some historical and geographical relations.For example,Mandarin dialect mainly uses the formal unit ? to represent the concept of EAT,Wu dialect mainly uses ?,while Min dialect uses ? and ?.There are colorful collocations of ?,?,?,? in Chinese dialects,and according to their syntactic structures,these collocations(so-called EAT formal unit collocations)can be classified into three types,namely,the verb-object collocations,the verb-complement collocations,and the modifier-head collocations.The verb-object collocations account for a large number of the selected collocations,the verb-complement collocations take the second place,and the modifier-head collocations take the third place.(2)There exist many differences among the EAT formal unit collocations in Chinese dialects.These differences can be divided into two main categories:firstly,the differences in the intra-linguistic system,the number and content of inherited ancient Chinese are different,some grammatical auxiliaries and suffixes are different,and the formal structures of some concepts are different.Secondly,there are differences in the formal representation of concepts:different collocations represent the same concept,similar or same collocations represent different concepts,unique collocations in different dialects,and the different ways of concept representation.There are some intra-linguistic reasons and extra-linguistic reasons for these differences.(3)Based on the theory of linguistic unit concept frame,we find that the collocation mechanisms of the EAT formal unit collocations in Chinese dialects mainly include the mechanism of direct statement,the mechanism of conceptual metaphor,the mechanism of conceptual metonymy,the mechanism of combination of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy.Furthermore,the EAT formal unit collocations in Chinese dialects can provide potential paths for further meaning extension of the ? in Putonghua and colorful references for further generation of the ? collocations in Putonghua.