A Study On Construal Mechanisms Of The Former Part Of Homophonic Xiehouyu From The Perspective Of Cognitive Construal Theory

Chinese Xiehouyu is the precious treasure of Chinese traditional culture,which has been widely employed by Chinese people in their daily life.It enjoys the features of witty,humor,vividness and presents the distinctive ethnic features and diverse characteristics of local life.The most important feature of Xiehouyu is that it consists of two parts--the former part and the latter part,and the former part of it is crucial to construe Xiehouyu.Moreover,homophonic Xiehouyu shares a third of it.However,studies on homophonic Xiehouyu are insufficient.Most of the scholars investigate the syntactic structure or the rhetorical features of Xiehouyu.Rather,the cognitive studies of Xiehouyu have been ignored and they don’t probe deeply into a certain field of it either.Therefore,homophonic Xiehouyu,as the widely-used type of Xiehouyu,is the research object of this study.According to the syntactic features of its former part,this study probes into the cognitive mechanisms of the former part of homophonic Xiehouyu by utilizing cognitive construal theory.Chinese Xiehouyu has been used as the close corpus for this study,in which1605 homophonic Xiehouyu have been collected as the research data of this study.And with the four dimensions of Langacker’s cognitive construal theory,the cognitive mechanisms of homophonic Xiehouyu have been examined.This present study has drawn the following conclusions.Based on the spatial dimension of homophonic Xiehouyu,there are three types:zero dimension,two dimensions,and three dimensions.The spatial dimension has a close relationship with its syntactic and semantic features.According to its syntactic and semantic features,there are five types:(1)modifier--head construction(zero dimension);(2)coordinated NP construction(zero dimension);(3)coordinated VP construction(three dimensions);(4)predicate--object with(out)adverbial construction(two dimensions);(5)subject-predicate(three dimensions).Some of the types has its subcategories which have similar cognitive images.Based on the syntactic,semantic and spatial features of the former part of homophonic Xiehouyu,the present study constructs the cognitive models ofhomophonic Xiehouyu with the four dimensions of cognitive construal theory.The five categories of homophonic Xiehouyu shares the similar construal sequences but each one of them have their different construal process.The construal dimensions always interweave with each other in the process of construal.The complexity of construal is closely related to the complexity of the syntactic features.The current study integrates the four dimensions of construal to construct the cognitive models to examine the cognitive mechanisms of the former part of homophonic Xiehouyu,which has effectively supplemented the previous researches and hopes to provide some inspirations for the future researches.