A Cognitive Study Of Cognates In Guo Luo-Derivation Based On MRC Model

Guo Luo-Derivation was written by Cheng Yaotian(1725-1814),a scholar of the Qing Dynasty.It describes the cognate relationship between pronunciation and meaning,which shows the rules of word formation.Besides,it provides convincing clues of etymology and word extension for“GuoLuo”(“??”,a kind of fruit)cognates.By revealing the inherent law of in the word formation process,it is believed that language is not all arbitrary but motivated.Cheng held“Pronunciations are determined by the shapes of objects,while the words are formed according to the pronunciations.”Previous studies on Guo Luo-Derivation are mainly from the perspective of etymology,and few researches have applied a theoretical framework to elaborate on the derivation and evolution process of the word family.According to the cognitive thinking mode of metaphor and metonymy along with the word extension process of radiation and concatenation model,this paper puts forward MRC Model to analyze 332 cognates in Guo Luo-Derivation,revealing the cognitive mechanism of Chinese cognates formation and development.This paper consists of five chapters.Chapter One: “Introduction”: This paper contains the motivation of the thesis,research purposes,research methods,corpus collection and layout of the paper.Chapter Two: “Literature Review”: It reviews the previous studies on the cognates of Guo Luo-Derivation and points out their shortcomings.Chapter Three: “Theoretical Framework”: This Chapter proposes MRC Model by combining the cognitive method of metaphor and metonymy with the word expansion model of radiation and concatenation.Thus,MRC cognitive model is established to discuss in detail the radiation and concatenation extension rules of those 332 cognates.Chapter Four: “Corpus Analysis”: It analyzes the relationship between pronunciation and meaning with the help of MRC Model.Through investigations and statistics,we have found that:1.Previous studies of Guo Luo-Derivation generally focus on explaining the contents but are lack of the theoretical framework.Therefore,the greatest contribution of this paper is to construct MRC theoretical model for better understanding of the derivative process of cognates,and display the cognitive mechanism followed by the ancient Chinese that “Pronunciation is determined by the shape of objects,while the word is formed according to the pronunciation.”2.Based on the phonetic metaphor,“GuoLuo” has derived into four types of sound patterns,and the distribution is: “X Luo”(60%)>“Xuo Yuo”(27.4%)>“Guo Luo”(6.9%)>“X Y”(5.7%).According to the statistics,the phonological iconicity of cognates mainly lies in “uo” of the second syllable “Luo”.3.The prototypical meaning of “GuoLuo” is “ROUND”,from which ten categories of word groups are formed.They extend semantically by the metaphorical and metonymic thinking.The distributions are as follows: ROUND(34.9%)> CURVE(16.6%)>SPREAD(12.3%)>LUMP(9.9%)and so on.4.The formation of cognates is closely related to pronunciation and meaning.In the Qing Dynasty,there is a great discovery to study words for Chinese Exegesis,that is,“While the pronunciation is similar,the meaning is in harmony.”(????)Cognitive linguists who believe in the iconicity of language happen to hold the same view.Chapter Five: “Conclusion”: It gives an overview of contribution on Guo LuoDerivation,and points out the shortcomings and give guidance for future research.