A Functional Study Of The Metapragmatic Construction "What Are We Talking About?"

Construction is generally considered as the basic unit of language and an abstract cognitive structure with unity of form and meaning,which widely exists in oral communication and guides the communicators to comprehend the discourse.Although construction grammar emphasizes the same importance of syntax,semantics and pragmatics,little attention has been paid to the pragmatic research and use mechanism of construction.Therefore,this paper attempts to study why the speaker chooses a certain construction in a specific context,what kind of pragmatic intention the speaker wants to express and the cognitive pragmatic mechanism of choosing the construction from the perspective of pragmatics.“What are we talking about?” as a rhetorical interrogative construction,it expresses the speaker's evaluation attitude towards the current information in different contexts,rather than the exploration of information.In this sense,“What are we talking about?” belongs to the discourse resources at the Meta level of language.We call it metapragmatic construction,which is the trace left by the speaker in the pragmatic level when he chooses the discourse,and reflects the speaker's metapragmatic awareness.Based on Verschueren's metapragmatic awareness in his theory of language adaptation,with the metapragmatic theory as the main theoretical framework,this study uses the integration of qualitative and quantitative research,analyzes the structural form and semantics of construction “What are we talking about?”,and attempts to answer the following research questions:(1)What are the construction features and metapragmatic features of “What are we talking about?”?;(2)What are the metapragmatic functions of “What are we talking about?”?;(3)What are the factors that affect the use of “What are we talking about?” by native English speakers?The findings of this study are as follows: Firstly,through the research on the components of “What are we talking about?”,it is found that in specific using process,“What are we talking about?” gradually loses its interrogative feature and turns into a construction with construction features.At the same time,“What are we talking about?” can reflect the speakers' metapragmatic awareness.The construction has metapragmatic features,belongs to metapragmatic construction,and also has the characteristics of reflexivity and formulaic.Secondly,this study finds that construction “What are we talking about?” has five metapragmatic functions,i.e.,discourse organization function,interpersonal conflict function,identity building function,emotional function and subjective evaluation function.Thirdly,this study finds that ensuring discourse coherence,expressing the speaker's emotional attitudeand maintaining interpersonal communication are important factors that affect the use of “What are we talking about?” by native English speakers.This study has positive implications for the study of English learners' learning and pragmatic problems of construction.First of all,English learners,especially Chinese English learners,should pay attention to constructions in the process of English communication consciously;second,in the process of learning,English learners should read more authentic corpus,actively communicate with native English speakers,and enrich their pragmatic knowledge;finally,in terms of the construction research,this paper studies the construction “What are we talking about?” from the perspective of metapragmatic construction can provide a new perspective for the further study of constructions.