The Inheritance Relation Study Of English WH- Dialogic Construction

English WH-dialogic construction is made up of a WH-question and its corresponding answer,and the question-and-answer pair forms the dialogic construction.However,few scholars investigate English special question and its corresponding answer from constructional perspective.Du Bois(2014)proposes the “Dialogic Syntax” officially,focusing on the research of paradigmatic level of pairing.With the development of dialogic syntax and further research of construction grammar,many scholars at home and abroad try to combine dialogue and construction,and propose a new research object— dialogic construction(Br?ne & Zima 2014;Kiki et al.2014;Y.Wang & Zeng 2016).Dialogic construction,as a new perspective of construction research,is still in its infancy.“Inheritance relation”(Goldberg,1995,p.72)reveals the similarities and differences of different constructions by motivation links.Wang holds the view that the relation between superordinate construction and subordinate construction can be shown by schema and instance.Taylor(2002)introduces “Grounding-The Grounded”,which makes the model gain more universality and explanatory power(Y.Wang,2010).Given this,the present research tries to fully investigate the inheritance types of WH-dialogic construction from different levels by integrating construction grammar,dialogic syntax and schema-instance model into a new integrated theoretical framework,based on the WH-dialogues collected from COCA.Compared with the inheritance links proposed by Goldberg(1995),this thesis is an extended concept,which holds the opinion that inheritance can happen in syntactic structures,semantic meaning,and the communicative attitude of dialogue— the syntactic,semantic,and pragmatic layer.In order to distinguish the difference,the author names the inheritance in different layers as syntactic resonance,semantic inheritance,and pragmatic cooperation.The thesis aims to answer the following questions:1)From the perspective of syntactic structures,how does the replier inherit thesyntactic structures of superordinate construction(WH-question)to producethe subordinate construction(the corresponding answer)? And does thedifferent type of inheritance in syntax have any relation with the choice ofspecial interrogative?2)From the semantic transfer,how many types of semantic inheritance can befound in the English WH-dialogic construction? Does the occurrencefrequency of different semantic inheritance have a relation with the type ofinterrogative?3)From the perspective of pragmatic cooperation,what attitude does the replierchoose to hold during the communication? Does the inheritance in thepragmatic level have anything to do with the choice of special interrogative? Isthere anything related among the three kinds of inheritance?The common English special interrogatives can be classified into two types: interrogative pronouns and interrogative adverbs.According to the search in the spoken corpus of COCA,the author finds that “what” gains the highest frequency among interrogative pronoun,and “when” ranks first among interrogative adverbs,followed by “how”.By analyzing the context of the two interrogative adverbs in COCA,the author finds that “how” gains a higher using frequency in WH-questions.Thus,the thesis selects what-and how-dialogues as the research object,collects 400 pairs of each from the spoken corpus of COCA randomly.Then,the author will adopt systematic sampling to choose one dialogue for every two to gain 200 pairs of each as the research corpus of the present research.The collected dialogues will be classified according to the structural parallelism,semantic inheritance,and communicative attitude.As for those dialogues which are different to classify,the author will search for more context in COCA to determine their category.After that,the percentages of each kind of inheritance in different aspects will be calculated,and the data will be drawn as histograms in virtue of Microsoft Excel 2016.Then,SPSS 24.0 will be used to analyze the correlation between special interrogatives and the different types of inheritance.The main research findings of the study are shown in the following:(1)From a syntactic structure's perspective,it's found that the replier will producehis or her utterance based on the syntactic structures of the question,thereby,there are three types of syntactic resonance: complete syntactic resonance,partial syntactic resonance,and non-syntactic resonance.Among the threetypes of syntactic resonance,partial syntactic resonance in what-dialogicconstruction and how-accounts for the largest percentages,69.5%,and 69%,and complete syntactic resonance in both cases takes up 15%,and no syntacticresonance accounts for 15.5% and 16%.It shows that repliers tend to reuse thelinguistic structures of the question to produce his or her utterances as torelieve the cognitive efforts for a better communication,which means thatsyntactic inheritance promotes communication.With the histograms and SPSS,the author finds that there is no significant difference between the ratios ofeach type in what-dialogic construction and how.Thus,it can be concludedthat whether the replier will inherit the syntactic structures of the question hasnothing to do with the type of special interrogatives,or the two do not have adirect connection.(2)In semantic transfer,according to the classification of the closed corpus,theauthor has found that there are four types of semantic inheritance: completemode of inheritance,partial mode of inheritance,multiple mode of inheritance,and non-inheritance.Based on the statistical analysis,it's found that partialmode of semantic inheritance of what-dialogic construction and how-occupiesthe largest percent,56% and 53.5%,complete mode accounts for 10.5% inboth what-and how-,multiple mode takes up 18% and 20%,andnon-inheritance only takes up 15.5% in what-dialogic construction and 16% ihow-.Thus,it demonstrates that the replier tends to more or less inherit thesemantic meaning from the question to produce the answer.Also,thehistogram and SPSS verify that the replier's choice of inheriting the semanticmeaning or not has nothing do with the choice of the special interrogatives ofthe question,or the two do not have a direct and evident link.The choice toinherit the semantic meaning may have something to do with the interlocutors'cognitive background and communicative environment.(3)As for pragmatic cooperation,the dialogues can be classified into four typesaccording to the realization of the communicative purpose: excessivecooperation,complete cooperation,the cooperation of interrogative focal point,and zero cooperation.Since the thesis holds the view that as long as thepurpose is fulfilled,the dialogue can be regarded as complete cooperationpragmatically.Thus,the pragmatic inheritance can be divided into three types:excessive cooperation,complete cooperation,and zero cooperation.Thestatistics indicate that full cooperation of what-dialogic construction and how-accounts for the largest ratio,60%,and 56.5%,and zero cooperation only takesup 22% and 23.5%.Thus,a conclusion can be drawn that English-speakingpeople tend to be cooperative to satisfy the questioner's need to fulfill thecommunicative purpose.The histogram and SPSS prove that the choice ofspecial interrogative has no significant relation with the type of inheritance.The reason why the replier holds an uncooperative attitude may havesomething to do with the cognitive reserve or interpersonal relationship.Besides,by analyzing the data in three aspects,it's found that replier willgenerally inherit the syntactic structures and semantic meaning of thequestioner to produce pragmatic correspondence if he or she holds acooperative attitude in the communication.This thesis discusses the inheritance relation of WH-dialogic construction from three different perspectives in virtue of construction grammar,dialogic syntax,and schema-instance model,reveals the inheritance relation in three different aspects behind WH-dialogic construction,broadens the research scope of inheritance,construction grammar,and dialogic syntax to provide a new research perspective for construction grammar and cognitive linguistics.