An Analysis Of Chinese Redundant Words From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics Theory

Reduplication is a common phenomenon in natural languages,and it is also an important and a special morphological means of word formation.However,most previous scholars have conducted research on Chinese reduplicative words from the perspective of traditional grammar,and they have mainly focused on the analysis of the morphological structures,grammatical meanings and pragmatic functions.Very few scholars have investigated Chinese reduplicative words from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.This thesis makes an attempt to explore Chinese reduplicative words from the perspective of iconicity theory,conceptual metaphor theory and image schema theory.The writer selects Chinese reduplicative words in modern mandarin as the corpus,and through a qualitative analysis,explore the motivations of Chinese reduplicative words and their cognitive mechanism of semantic changes.The research findings are as follows.First of all,compared with the basic forms,the semantic contents of reduplicative words display the increase of quantity,the enhancement of degree and the repetition or continuation of action;Secondly,the sequence of some Chinese reduplicative words is consistent with that of human perception of the physical world.Finally,some Chinese reduplicative words present abstract and extended meanings rather than the literal meanings,which is realized through the mechanism of conceptual metaphors.