The Understanding Of Chinese Rhetorical Questions In A CBT-RT Model

The rhetorical question(RQ)is often used in daily conversations.It has attracted the attention of researchers since ancient times.Rhetoricians,grammarians,and linguists have examined rhetorical questions in multi-dimensions from a variety of perspectives.However,few scholars have studied the understanding of rhetorical questions from a cognitive perspective.So there are still some inadequacies in these researches.Cognitive linguistics provides a novel perspective for language research.It reveals the inseparable relation between human cognition and language understanding.This thesis attempts to integrate Conceptual Blending Theory and Relevance Theory,and proposes a CBT-RT model to clearly illustrate the process of meaning construction.Then the model is used to make an analysis of the collected Nandao-rhetorical questions("Nandao"RQs)to verify its explanatory power.The data in this study are from Contemporary Chinese Corpus at Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU(CCL),among which 133 sentences are studied.According to the position of the "Nandao" RQ in a discourse,the author divides it into four classes:at the beginning of a discourse,in the middle of a discourse,at the end of a discourse.and appearing alone.Then she explains the understanding process of these four types.respectively and constructs the CBT-RT model to comprehend(of understanding)'Nandao”RQs.The thesis further explains functions of the word "Nandao",discusses factors that influence the understanding of "Nandao" RQs and causes of communication failure.Then it provides some implications for successful communication.The findings of this study are as follows:First,the informative intention of the speaker by using "Nandao"RQs is to convey negative meaning,that is,the expliciture of the discourse.The listener's understanding of this meaning may be obtained either only by decoding,or by combining the encoded information(I1)and the cognitive context(I2).The two input spaces are generally linked by the vital relation—"disanalogy",and the elements are compressed into "uniqueness" in the blended space.The speaker's communicative intention varies according to different subjects.He/she may vent strong emotions to the listener,ask the other party to stand on their side to consider the problem,gain empathy,shorten/widen the psychological distance,or discuss with the listener of certain opinions and convince him/her.Second,the word "Nandao" plays an essential part in intensifying rhetorical tone and strengthening the speaker's emotions,for it exerts a double coercive effect on the listener.To be specific,the speaker presupposes that the listener conceives an"unreasonable" belief and uses "Nandao" to deny it.In this way,it "forces" the listener to admit his/her wrong opinion and to agree to the speaker's statement.In addition,the strong emotion conveyed by "Nandao" is a part of contextual effects.It requires the listener to make more cognitive effort when he/she is processing information.Third,the factors that influence the understanding of "Nandao" RQs are coded information,intonation and body language,idealized cognitive model,cultural model and individual inference ability.Fourth,communication failure arises from decoding failure,reasoning failure,and unwillingness to cooperate.This research not only makes some supplements to Conceptual Blending Theory and Relevance Theory,but also finds a new method for studying Chinese rhetorical questions.In addition,it offers some implications to correctly understand "Nandao"RQs.