A Construction Grammar-based Cognitive Approach To The Structure “X A X B” In A Dream Of Red Mansions

As one of the four Chinese classic works,Hong Lou Meng also called A Dream of Read Mansions serves as the encyclopedia about Chinese feudal society and the refined collection of Chinese traditional culture.It consists of 120 chapters and was written in the vernacular Chinese,and its genre approximately equivalent to modern Chinese.The structure “X A X B” is widely used in this literary work.Collecting the data of the structure “X A X B” from A Dream of Red Mansions for the self-built Chinese Corpus of A Dream of Red Mansions(CDRM),this thesis,based on the Construction Grammar(CxG),mainly through literature review,text analysis,and corpus-based empirical research,conducts a comprehensive investigation and in-depth analysis of “X A X B” construction in A Dream of Red Mansions from the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic aspects.Following Goldberg(1995)'s Construction Grammar theory,this thesis firstly clarifies the structure “X A X B” into 5 kinds: “X A X B”,“X A B”,“X A Not A”,“X A”,“A B”;and then annotates those kinds based on their cognitive mechanism including metaphor,and AntConc 3.2.1 for the retrieving and calculation of the frequency and concordance instances of theses structures.By adopting the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis method,the “X A X B” construction will be analyzed from its syntactic,semantic and pragmatic perspectives.The research findings are as follows: Syntactically,there are two basic non-interrogative usages of “X” in the “X A X B” construction,that is,full reference and negation.The grammatical categories of A and B are usually can be nouns,adjectives,verbs or short sentences,and the semantic relationships between A and B are generally synonymous,antonym,hyponyms or belonging to the same semantic domain.In addition,the internal cognitive mechanisms of this kind of construction are Conceptual metaphor and Conceptual metonymy which are the universal cognitive ability of our human beings.From the external perspective,its generation methods include enumeration,division and inclusion.(2)From the level of semantics,the meaning of “X A X B” construction is not just the sum of “X”,“A” and “B”.In addition,based on the data from Chinese corpus of A Dream of Red Mansions,the concordance lines show that the “X” has its semantic meaning of universal reference or negative,and the semantic features of “X A X B” construction contains [+ disdain],[+ dissatisfaction] and [+ refutation].(3)Pragmatically,the “X A X B” construction appears 119 times in total in A Dream of Red Mansions,among which 116 of them are used in dialogues or conversation between characters,that is to say,this kind of construction is generally used in the context of oral style rather than that of written genre.What's more,the pragmatic functions of “X A X B” construction include imperative function and the emotional function.In this thesis,under the guidance of construction grammar theory in cognitive linguistics and with the help of corpus in combination with the analysis,a comprehensive investigation of the “X A X B” structure and its variants in A Dream of Red Mansions is conducted from the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic aspects.It hopes to offer some insights for the development of cognitive linguistics,corpus linguistics and the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.