Cognitive Mechanism Of Metalinguistic Negation Construction In Modern Chinese

Language,whose meaning is far more than the interpretation of truth conditional semantics,is not merely the objective description of the world.The interaction between language and cognitive abilities brings abstractions to human’s thinking.Adequate explanation of linguistic phenomenon is needed to start from the perspective of cognitive mechanism of meaning as construal of meaning is not only the interaction between individual subjects of conceptualization and the object,but also the coordination between the subjects of conceptualization.Intersubjective feature of language can promote the development of linguistic units and accelerate its evolution into syntactic constructions.Metalinguistic negation is a kind of linguistic choice that people make in communication because of intersubjectivity.Scholars have done a lot of research on this linguistic phenomena from different perspectives and tried to make a unified explanation with little work been done from the intersubjective perspective.Based on the limitations of previous studies,this thesis takes metalinguistic negation construction in modern Chinese as the research object and studies its cognitive mechanism so as to explore the underlying relationship between language and cognition.This thesis defines metalinguistic negation as a member of constructions of intersubjectivity.From the perspective of Cognitive Grammar and Dialogic Syntax,the author constructs CS Model on the basis of construal and the theory of stance to explain the cognitive mechanism of metalinguistic negation construction after analyzing the collected examples and then explores its syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features.The author selects 200 examples from CCL corpus,previous studies and authentic discourse,and then divides them into six categories.After qualitative and quantitative analysis,results can be shown as follows:1.Syntactically,metalinguistic negation construction,a complex sentencestructure which is composed of at least one negative clause with at least one affirmative clause added,is a kind of discourse constructions.It is created in discourse,and the construction of meaning involves the conceptualization of both parties in the communication.2.Semantically,metalinguistic negation construction is not calculable.The object of the negation is the felicity conditions of the utterance,but not the truth conditions.According to different construal operations used by the subjects of conceptualization,meaning can be highlighted in different dimensions.3.Pragmatically,metalinguistic negation construction reveals human’s emotion and manifests the strategic use of language.In certain sociocultural background and context,different pragmatic meanings can be interpreted.What’s more,the pragmatic effects such as emphasis and humor are achieved through the foregrounding of related semantic information.This thesis is a tentative research on metalinguistic negation construction.Owing to its extensive applicability,the research results can have certain reference value in fields like teaching,advertising industry and so on.