A Cognitive Semantic Study Of Chinese Non-compositional Attribute-head Phrases

With the rapid development of mass media,people usually receive a large number of Chinese Attribute-Head Phrases(AHPs),many of which are non-compositional.The AHPs are composed of the A(for attribute)and the H(for head).If one of the components in the Attribute-Head structure is non-compositional,the phrase is a non-compositional AHP.The non-compositional expressions are also constructed on the basis of embodiment and cognition,which can be divided into two parts.One is conventionalized,which mostly refers to idioms.While,the other is not conventionalized,which mainly includes super-normal collocations.Because the non-compositional AHPs are difficult to understand,they have gradually become a hot topic in linguistic research.However,within previous studies of the Chinese non-compositional AHPs,many researches only focus on a word family.Moreover,there are few studies of the detailed description of meaning constructions from the perspective of cognitive semantics.Therefore,based on linguistic unit concept frame,conceptual metaphor and metonymy,and cultural model theory,this thesis applies qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the meaning constructions of 250 Chinese non-compositional AHPs,which are picked out from mass media,including People's Daily,Xinhua News,etc.Thisthesis aims to answer the following questions:(1)How can Chinese non-compositional AHPs be classified?(2)How are the meanings of Chinese non-compositional AHPs with non-compositional A &compositional H and compositional A & non-compositional H constructed?(3)How are the meanings of Chinese non-compositional AHPs with non-compositional A & non-compositional H constructed?This thesis includes the following findings:(1)According to the non-compositional components in the Attribute-Head structure,the Chinese non-compositional AHPs are divided into the AHPs with non-compositional A & compositional H and compositional A &non-compositional H and the AHPs with non-compositional A &non-compositional H.Then,according to the conceptual contents represented by the non-compositional components,these AHPs are further divided into the AHPs with non-compositional components representing thing concepts and event concepts.(2)The meaning constructions of the AHPs with non-compositional A & compositional H and compositional A & non-compositional H are based on the meanings of compositional components and the specific context.The involving cognitive operations include conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy.(3)The meaning constructions of the AHPs with non-compositional A & non-compositional H are dependent on the specific context.The cognitive operation of conceptual metonymy ismostly used,including simple metonymy,compound metonymy and complex metonymy.This cognitive semantic study of the Chinese non-compositional AHPs shows that the classification on these AHPs according to conceptual contents is quite necessary.Both the production and understanding of these AHPs need the support of conceptual knowledge structures.Analyzing how the meaning is constructed can help us better understand these AHPs and the motivations of the language production.