| ’Copula’(e.g.’shi’ in Mandarin and ’be’ in English),also known as linking verb,is frequently used across human languages to connect two nominal items to form sentences in the configuration of[NP1+(Copula)+NP2],so that the entities represented by the two NPs are semantically or logically related,thereby expressing a relationship of ’predication’ or ’equation’.The former are sentences like ’Monica is a model’ and’Zhang San is a warrior’,and the latter like ’Monica is the model’ and ’Zhang San is the warrior’.Wang(1957,1985)regards them as attributive sentences and equative sentences.The two types of constructions are also called predicational construction and equative construction respectively in the English literature(see Higgins 1973;Mikkel sen 2011;Hey cock 2012 among others).In spoken Mandarin,there exists a type of gibberish utterances,such as ta shi ge riben nüren(literally ’He is a Japanese woman’)(Chao 1968),ta shi xiehe yiyuan(literally ’He is Union Hospital’)(Shen 2008),huli shi yige tong(literally ’The fox is a hole’)(Zhang and Deng 2010),etc.In these sentences,the two NPs are neither attributive nor equative.Due to their unconventional composition,the whole sentences are obviously semantically anomalous,which Wang(1985)treats as ’illogical’ ones,or form-meaning mismatched copular constructions in later literature.The type of copular structure illustrated above is not unique to Mandarin,but is instead a relatively common cross-linguistic phenomenon,as shown in the English and Japanese examples below:a.I am the ham sandwich.(Nunberg 1995:13)b.John is the Washington Post.(Nunberg 1995:61)c.Tuesday is Merle Haggard.(Ward 2004:283)d.仆はウナギだ(’I am eel rice’).(Okutsuki 1978:17)e.彼は二人の娘です(’He is two girls’).f.彼女はBMWです(’She is BMW’).The non-canonical copular constructions given above cannot be understood in the way conventional copular constructions are.Taking ’私は BMW です’(I am BMW)as an example,the two NPs in this Japanese utterance belong to different semantic categories,namely ’human’ and ’car’.Albeit morpho-syntactically the sentence looks like a copular construction,yet semantically it is rather difficult to establish a logical connection between the two nominal items as quickly as a conventional copular one(such as ’My car is BMW’).In fact,these morpho-syntactically parsimonious sentences are mostly produced under conversational contexts,that is,they are highly contextdependent.In view of the semantic anomaly and contextual dependency of the copular sentences at issue,the questions that naturally arise are:(1)Are the form-meaning mismatched copula utterances randomly occurring expressions,or grammatical constructions with strong productivity?(2)What kind of productive mechanism and interpretive mechanism do they have?(3)Why can speakers and hearers work together so well to produce and to understand such unconventional utterances?In the first place,it is pointed out in this study that the sentences illustrated above are inclined to appear in larger,conversational contexts.When the contextual background is very clear,the speaker can omit some known information during the course of communication.Specifically,the speaker,who is driven by ’the Principle of Least Effort’(Zipf 1949),adopts ’conceptual metonymy’(Lakoff 1987),a widely used method of communication across human languages.As has been correctly pointed out in Ziegeler(2007),’metonymy’ is often used to reduce the effort required to encode messages and to reduce the effort of decoding them.For sentences like ’He is a Japanese woman’,for example,Chao(1968)points out that the speaker actually employs ’he’ to refer to ’his servant’,so the sentence should be construed as ’His servant is a Japanese woman’.Therefore,the main thesis of this study is that the form-meaning mismatched copular construction presented above is a product of the interaction between structure,semantics,and pragmatics.In terms of structure,the unconventional copular sentence is similar to the conventional copular construction,and its configuration can be described as[NP1+(Copula)+NP2].In terms of semantics,the semantic categories of the NPs can be different,such as ’I am the ham sandwich’(Nunberg 1995),the former is ’human’ and the latter is ’food’.The two nominal expressions are neither in an attributive nor an equative relationship,which is why Wang(1985)calls these sentences’illogical’.In terms of pragmatics,listeners would focus on the logical relationship between the two NPs during the interpretive process,and then use their own encyclopedic knowledge to do pragmatic reasoning relative to the particular context.The inference of the form-meaning mismatched copular construction is,therefore,essentially a relevance-based process.In short,both the speaker’s production and the listener’s comprehension are the processes of realizing ’ optimal relevance’.Accordingly,this study explores the form-meaning mismatched copular construction from the interactive perspective of structure,semantics and pragmatics.Within the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar(Goldberg 2006),this study delineates the constructional characteristics of the sentences at issue,namely,high productivity,high schematicity,and poor compositionality.Given its context dependency,a relevance-theoretic account is provided to explain how such utterances are interpreted during the communicative process.There are seven chapters in total.Chapter One is ’Introduction’,which introduces the object of study,research questions,research significance as well as the layout of the entire dissertation.Chapter Two,’Literature Review’,presents a critical review of previous analyses of the form-meaning mismatched copular construction.In terms of productive mechanism,some scholars claim that the production process of this construction is due to the omission of certain linguistic components(see Chao 1968).Within the framework of generative grammar,some scholars(see Zhang 2007,2012;Zhang and Deng 2010,2011)analyze the form-meaning mismatched construction as a topic construction containing an empty subject(e)in the comment clause,such as ’He is a Japanese woman’,and if the empty subject is completed,it becomes ’He,(servant)is a Japanese woman’.Other scholars analyze this structure as a group of sentences with similar forms and meanings through association and mixing(see Chao 1976;Shen 2006,2007,2008 among others).As far as the production process is concerned,Shen(2008)claims that the productive mechanism of mismatched construction is ’analogical blending’,and it expresses a kind of ’empathy’ and ’subjective identification’ of the speaker.Taking ’He is a Japanese woman’ as an example,the speaker equates ’he’ with’Japanese woman’,and empathizes ’he’ to ’Japanese woman’,expressing an emotion of merging.In our view,the ’ analogical blending’ and ’ empathy’ approaches are rather unduly complicated.And when the ’empathy’ is used to analyze the form-meaning mismatched copula structures,some make sense and some do not.For example,when a police officer is reporting on his weekly work,he can say,’I caught three thieves this week’,and another police can say,’I’m two robbers’.It is not appropriate to analyze that the police empathize himself with two criminals when he speaks,and it is even more inappropriate to analyze that the police equate himself with two criminals.Comparatively,’conceptual metonymy’ is obviously a more concise and effective method than ’sympathy’ and ’analogical blending’.In ’He is a Japanese woman’,for example,if the empty subject is realized,the sentence then becomes ’For him,his servant is Japanese woman’.The completed sentence is precisely the result of conceptual metonymy.Therefore,one of the NPs should be semantically construed as a conceptual metonymy,which is in accordance with Occam’s Razor,the law of parsimony.Overseas research on the form-meaning mismatched construction mainly focuses on its semantic mechanism.A variety of novel concepts has been proposed,such as’deferred ostension’(Quine 1969;Nunberg 1977),’deferred reference’(Nunberg 1981),’transfers of reference’(Sag 1981),’transfers of meaning’(Nunberg 1993,1995),’deferred equative’(Ward 2004),etc.These new concepts provide an in-depth analysis of issues concerning the meaning and reference of nominal terms in the relevant sentences.Under close examination,the newly proposed concepts just provide different annotations of the mechanism of ’conceptual metonymy’,because ’sense’ and’reference’ are just the two sides of a same coin(see Frege 1892).As far as the object of study is concerned,if the meaning of the pre-copular NP1 or the post-copular NP2 has changed,namely,it is no longer used to express its own meaning,then,it can naturally be said that its referent has also changed.That is to say,it has shifted to the object that the speaker intends to refer to.In addition,our analysis of construing one of NPs as ’conceptual metonymy’ is in line with Occam’s Razor,that is,the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is likely to be more correct than a complex one.Chapter Three introduces ’Theoretical Framework’.This study adopts Construction Grammar(Goldberg 2006)in order to delineate the structural characteristics of the copular construction at issue.Various kinds of linguistic units such as morphemes,words,phrases,clauses,can be treated as form-meaning pairings,that,is,they are all ’constructions’,so that a language can therefore be regarded as a network of constructions.Next,three components of ’construction’(Traugott and Trousdale 2013),and recent developments in construction grammar,the study of pragmatic turn in particular(Goldberg 2019),have also been introduced.Given its contextual dependency,this chapter then discusses the relationship between construction and pragmatics.It is argued that both the production and the interpretation of the unconventional copular constructions are essentially the processes of realizing ’optimal relevance’.Accordingly,the ostensive-inferential communicative mechanism of Relevance Theory has been introduced and discussed.Chapter 4 presents a delineation of the ’constructional characteristics’ of the copular constructions under question:high productivity,high schematicity,and weak compositionality.’Productivity’ is mainly reflected in type frequency and token frequency,which refers to the ability of a construction to accommodate different categories to fill empty slots;’schematicity’ refers to the hierarchy of superordinate frames abstracted from a collection of related constructions;’compositionality’ refers to the degree of matching between the form and meaning of a construction.If form and meaning matches,the degree of compositionality is high,and vice versa.As far as the object of study is concerned,its productivity is high:the semantic types of nominal phrases are varied,precisely there are about four major categories and fifteen subcategories,and the type and token frequencies are high.Its schematicity is also high:it has a number of sub-schema types and rich schema levels,which also reflects its high productivity.Its compositionality is weak:the two noun phrases in the construction cannot be understood in the way a canonical copular construction is,the pre-copular NP is not a member of the class denoted by the post-copular NP.Chapter 5 provides a relevance-theoretic analysis of the interpretive process of the form-meaning mismatched copular constructions.Given its un-compositional nature,the interpretive process of such constructions is essentially a relevance-based inferential procedure.Taking ta shi ge riben nvren(literally ’He is a Japanese woman’)and laozhang shi liananhaier(literally ’Zhang is two boys’)as examples,during the interpretive process,(1)the hearer first needs to determine the topic of conversation;(2)then based on the topic of conversation as well as the discourse context,the hearer uses encyclopedic knowledge to infer that conceptual metonymy occurs with one of the nominal phrases;(3)the relevance between nominal terms and their intended references is established and the whole sentence is decoded accordingly.Based on such preliminary analysis,this chapter provides a formal characterization of the interpretive process of the construction at issue within the framework of Relevance Theory(Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995;Sperber and Wilson 2008;Wilson and Sperber 2012,etc.).Accordingly,a relevance-theoretic account of the ostensive-inferential process of the un-compositional construction has been proposed.Chapter 6 explores ’copular-less constructions’,such as ’Table One,beef fried noodles’,’She,two boys’.To begin with,this chapter explains why the copular morpheme can be omitted:Originally a language may not have the term of ’copula’,and later some deictic terms evolve into copular ones;copulas can be omitted in spoken language,this process is called ’copula cycle’(Katz 1996,van Gelderen 2015,2016;Sampson and Mayberry 2022 among others).Since the copular morpheme has no semantic content,after omitting it,the understanding of the mismatched utterance falls on the logical relationship between the noun phrases.Semantically,the structure of the utterance at issue can still be treated as the output of ’conceptual transferred designation’;for example,"Table One "in ’Table One,beef fried noodles’ is used to refer to ’the person sitting at table one’.Pragmatically,the logical relationship between the two NPs can be established by ’bridging effect’.’Bridging’ is a kind of pragmatic inference about related entities or events in the discourse.Interpretively,the NPs without a copula connecting them would still require the listener to use encyclopedic knowledge to make relevance-based inference,and hence the interpretive process of the copula-less utterances is still a relevance-based one.Chapter 7 is ’Conclusions’.It provides a summary of the contributions and innovations of the present study,and points out its demerits as well as the future work along the same line. |
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