| Evaluation is one of the most important practical activities of human beings,and language is one of the most important tools for human evaluation.Evaluative language has been richly studied at home and abroad,whereas these studies mainly employ the Appraisal Theory and adopt introspective method to study evaluative language on the discourse level,rarely looking into the inner structure of evaluative words,which provides a space for the present research.This research probes into the semantic constructions and cognitive mechanisms of Chinese evaluative bigram-words of Ren under the framework of the Construction Grammar and the Conceptual Blending Theory.Langacker's Cognitive Construction Grammar helps to figure out the relationship between evaluative meaning and descriptive meaning of typical constructions;Conceptual Blending Theory helps to analyze the evaluative meaning of atypical evaluative words.Based on the self-built corpus and the qualitative analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)According to the internal logical structure of evaluative words,semantic constructions of Chinese evaluative bigram-words of Ren show a complex typical-atypical division.Typical constructions are both evaluative and descriptive,varying in eight ways according to the numbers and source of evaluative meaning and descriptive meaning,such as “evaluative character + descriptive character”,“descriptive character + evaluative character”,“evaluative character + evaluative and descriptive character”,and etc.Atypical evaluative words fall into two types: atypical ? have only evaluative meaning with 3 variants: “evaluative character + evaluative character”,“evaluative character +?(function character)”,and “ ?+ evaluative character”;Atypical ? contain only descriptive meaning and also have 3 variants: “descriptive character + descriptive character”,“descriptive character + ?”,and “?+ descriptive character”;(2)Typical evaluative bigram-words have the following characteristics: first,the core members are of “evaluative character + descriptive character(Being or Relation)”construction.Their descriptive and evaluative meanings are in Autonomy-Dependence Alignment,in which the latter modifies the former.Second,the extended members are different from the core ones in terms of the nature,location and numbers of evaluativemeaning and descriptive meaning.Their constructions show the following trend: when the overall descriptive meaning of the word is Being or Relation,their descriptive meaning and evaluative meaning are in Autonomy-Dependence Alignment;when the overall descriptive meaning of the word is Action,Quality,or dynamic changes of a Relation,however,their evaluative meaning and descriptive meaning are in Dependence-Dependence Alignment,where the descriptive meaning is coerced to correlate with the person associated in the evaluation event,so as to elaborate the evaluative meaning;(3)Atypical ? solely containing evaluative meaning have four types of semantic fields: the resembling,the overlapping,the inclining,and the attaching.People often combine two characters with related,similar or identical meanings together to strengthen their attitudinal evaluation.The evaluative meaning of these words is a dependent structure,and the autonomous structure is hidden in and can be provided by the context;(4)Atypical ? solely containing descriptive meaning are special appraisal resources made evaluative by metaphor or metonymy.The evaluator purposefully sifts and chooses a descriptive concept in the source domain,to activate the subjective evaluation by way of similarity activation,“part-whole” activation,or “cause-effect”activation,thus producing pragmatic value,enticing value,and moral value.Eventually,a four-dimensional attitudinal evaluation mechanism,that is,society(culture)-reality-thought-language,is formed.Findings of the present study,meaning constructions and cognitive mechanisms of evaluative words concerning Ren,can provide references for researches on evaluative words of other types. |
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