| The topic of this study is parallelism in dialogues,i.e.a linguistic expression with two structures,which are syntactically parallel and semantically relevant.This study takes the representative SVO parallelism in Mandarin Chinese dialogue as a case to explore the generative mechanism of parallelism and the mechanism of the meaning inference of parallelism.SVO parallelism consists of two parts: the base utterance and the target utterance,as illustrated in the following example:Xiaoxian visited the shop selling fish and flowers in the morning and met Yifei who was buying a fish tank.Yifei: Morning! What are you doing?Xiaoxian: I am hanging around.What about you?Yifei: I bought a small fish tank.(Xiaoxian was so surprised when he saw the tank was two or three meters long.)Xiaoxian: Wow,it’s so big! Didn’t you buy a big bathtub?“Love Apartments”Xiaoxian reproduces Yifei’s syntactic frame of SVO,i.e.“I(you)bought X”(“我/你买了X”),and produces the target utterance“You bought a big bathtub”(“你买了个大浴缸吧”),then the target and the base utterance“I bought a small fish tank”(“我买了个小鱼缸”)construct a SVO parallelism.Semantically,the target and the base are contrastive,i.e.Yifei holds that the fish tank is small while Xiaoxian considers it big.Pragmatically,Xiaoxian expresses refutation and negation.A preliminary study has found that the current speaker reproduces the SVO syntactic frame to construct the target utterance,and that the structure of the target and the base,i.e.base utterance+target utterance,is called SVO parallelism.Formally,the structure has the same SVO syntactic frame;semantically,the target and the base are similar,opposite and complementary;pragmatically,the structure expresses agreement,support,refutation,negation,supplementation,answering,questioning and other discourse functions.Previous studies on parallelism in dialogue have focused on two major aspects: the generative mechanism of parallelism and the mechanism of the meaning inference of parallelism,i.e.the relationship between form and meaning.From the perspectives of psycholinguistics,dialogue syntax,and cognitive grammar,scholars have proposed the generative mechanism of parallelism and the mechanism of the meaning inference of parallelism.However,the generative mechanism of parallelism is not comprehensive enough;there is still a lack of an effective mechanism of meaning inference;so far,there is still a lack of a research to combine the two.In view of the above research status,this study intends to explore the generative mechanism of SVO parallelism and its mechanism of meaning inference from form to meaning within a unified framework.In the dissertation,the realization of the same SVO structure is called form coordination;the realization of the context-based meaning relation between utterances is called meaning coordination.Therefore,the dissertation intends to answer the following three questions: Firstly,how to achieve the form coordination of SVO parallelism? Secondly,how to achieve the meaning coordination of SVO parallelism? Thirdly,what is the cognitive mechanism that combines the form and the meaning of SVO parallelism?For the above research questions,this study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods with a relatively more emphasis on the latter.568 SVO parallelism are manually collected from films,TV series,and daily life.The number of SVO parallelism is 237,accounting for 41.7% of the total.Therefore,the dissertation selects a representative SVO parallelism as an example.The dissertation carefully observes and analyzes the SVO parallelism collected,classifies them into different types,and summarizes their formal,semantic,and pragmatic features.It uses qualitative methods: under the guidance of Usage Event Model and the theory of schema-instance in cognitive grammar,it proposes the theoretical hypothesis of SVO parallelism,builds the coordination model of SVO parallelism,and with it,analyses SVO parallelism,with the model verified in the end.This dissertation proposes the hypothesis of the cognitive processing of SVO parallelism: the essence of the cognitive processing of SVO parallelism is the coordinating process of the target and the base from form to meaning,and form coordination creates meaning coordination;form coordination refers to the realization of the same SVO structure,and meaning coordination refers to the realization of the context-based meaning relation between utterances.Guided by this hypothesis,based on Dialogic Syntax,Usage Event Model and the theory of schema-instance,the study builds the coordination model of SVO parallelism which offers a unified explanation on the coordinating process of different types of SVO parallelism.According to the coordination model,the speaker’s base utterance activates a schema of SVO structure,and the hearer’s utterance instantiates the schema,generating the target with the same SVO structure.The target and the base thus achieve form coordination,constructing a SVO parallelism.In communicative interaction,the structural parallelism in dialogically juxtaposed utterances invites a mapping of counterparts which triggers syntactic resonance generating the context-based meaning relation between utterances,and therefore the meaning coordination between utterances is achieved.According to the mechanism of syntactic resonance,the base motivates the syntactic schema and the corresponding event schema simultaneously,and in this event schema,the communicating participants realize the joint accommodation of different construals on this conceptual structure and achieve meaning coordination.The findings of this study are as follows:Firstly,according to Langacker’s theory of category and Taylor’s schema-instance theory,the dissertation proposes a cognitive mechanism of the form coordination of SVO parallelism,i.e.instance-schema-instance.The speaker’s base utterance activates a schema of SVO structure,and the hearer’s utterance instantiates it,and generates the target with the same SVO structure.Then the target and the base achieve form coordination.Secondly,this dissertation discusses the cognitive mechanism for the meaning inference of SVO parallelism.The target and the base form a SVO parallelism.In communicative interaction,the structural parallelism in dialogically juxtaposed utterances invites a mapping of counterparts which triggers syntactic resonance generating the context-based meaning relation between utterances,and therefore the meaning coordination between utterances achieves.According to the mechanism of syntactic resonance,the base motivates the syntactic schema and the corresponding event schema simultaneously,and in this event schema,the communicating participants realize the joint accommodation of different construals on this conceptual structure and achieve meaning coordination.Thirdly,this dissertation finds that the cognitive processing of SVO parallelism is a coordinating process from form to meaning of the target and the base,and it is also a process of cognitive coordination between the hearer and the speaker.The processing of SVO parallelism is a joint action.The communicating participants engage in cognitive coordination by means of utterances,with respect to some object of conceptualization.Syntactically,the speaker’s base utterance activates a syntactic schema,and the hearer’s utterance instantiates it;semantically,the speaker’s base utterance activates a corresponding semantic schema,i.e.event schema,and the hearer’s utterance instantiates it.It creates different construals on the same conceptual structure of the communicating participants.The parallelism and mapping between utterances contribute to construct the context-based meaning relation between utterances,and therefore the communicating participants realize the joint accommodation of different construals on this conceptual structure.Fourthly,this study proposes an inferential model of conversational implicature based on parallelism.In communicative interaction,the structural parallelism in dialogically juxtaposed utterances invites a mapping of counterparts which triggers dialogic resonance generating the conversational implicature.According to the mechanism of dialogic resonance,the base motivates the syntactic schema and the corresponding event schema simultaneously,and in this event schema,the communicating participants provide different construals on the same conceptual structure,which generates comparison.The syntactic,semantic and pragmatic mapping between utterances offer the cognitive context which contributes to the construction of the contrast and analogy of context-based meaning based on two kinds of construals,which generates conversational implicature.This dissertation consists of eight chapters.Chapter One is introduction,which defines the research topic,proposes research motives and questions,introduces research methods,corpus sources,theoretical basis,and the composition of the dissertation.Chapter Two is the literature review,which is about the previous studies and tries to find the main problems that need to be solved.Chapter Three describes the theoretical framework of this study.Based on a careful observation of the corpus,this chapter proposes the theoretical hypotheses about SVO parallelism.Based on this hypothesis,it attempts to build the coordination model of SVO parallelism which offers a unified explanation on coordinating process of different types of SVO parallelism.Chapter Four is about the classification and characteristics of SVO parallelism.SVO parallelism can be classified into two types: extension and elaboration;the former is divided into the SVO parallelism of the single syntactic component and the SVO parallelism of syntactic relationship.The latter is divided into the SVO parallelism with a focus pair(question-answer)and the SVO parallelism without a focus pair.Each type of SVO parallelism possesses distinctive formal,semantic,and pragmatic features.Chapter Five analyses the coordinating process of the SVO parallelism of extension,and offers a unified explanation to the subcategories of the SVO parallelism of the single syntactic component and the SVO parallelism of syntactic relationship.The sixth chapter explains the coordinating process of the SVO parallelism of elaboration,and offers a unified analysis of the SVO parallelism with a focus pair and the SVO parallelism without a focus pair.Chapter Seven is a cognitive pragmatic analysis of SVO parallelism,which deepens the discovery of SVO parallelism in four aspects: the features of three types of coordination,the inferential model of conversational implicature based on parallelism,SVO parallelism in the ongoing interaction and the idea of Chinese syntax as part of pragmatics is represented in SVO parallelism.Chapter Eight concludes the dissertation. |
