A Cognitive Approach To The Productive Mechanism Of English Quasi-affixes

As Chinese quasi-affixes men (门), zu (族), re (热) become more and more popular and widely used in our daily life, many linguists have attached great importance to this language phenomenon. However, such researches on English quasi-affixes are comparatively few. In fact, there are still many English quasi-affixes in English language. Since the present study about English quasi-affixes is only a beginning, there is a long way to go. Therefore, to further the study about English quasi-affixes, especially the productive mechanism of them is very necessary. Based on the previous relevant studies about Chinese and English quasi-affixes, the paper composes a working corpus and exhaustively collects 17 English quasi-affixes. Then according to the word-class of the quasi-affixes, the author classifies those quasi-affixes into two types, namely noun quasi-affix and adjective quasi-affix. At last, the paper analyzes the productive mechanism of the two types of quasi-affixes in detail and finally proves that metonymy is the productive mechanism of English quasi-affixes. Metonymy transfers the meanings of free morphemes which gradually develop into quasi-affixes from concrete to abstract to different degrees. During the whole productive process of English quasi-affixes, the three models of metonymy, named as"part-for-whole metonymy","whole-for-part metonymy", and"part-for-part metonymy", play an important role.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One provides a general introduction to this study, consisting of motivation, objective, methodology as well as layout.Chapter Two first reviews the research background, and gives a relatively comprehensive definition of English quasi-affixes by studying the previous definitions proposed by scholars such as Lv Shuxiang, Ren Xueliang, Bussmann and Wang Wenbin. Then, this paper makes a review of the previous relevant studies about Chinese and English quasi-affixes from various points of view, such as the semantic, pragmatics, lexicological and cognitive linguistics perspectives. In order to make up for the previous research limitations, especial the limitations of the research on English quasi-affixes, this paper analyzes the productive mechanism of English quasi-affixes from a cognitive perspective.Chapter Three gives a detailed introduction to the theoretical basis of the present study. The author first introduces the theory of ICM. Then the metonymy mechanism in ICM is introduced in detail. There are mainly three types of metonymic models: the whole-for-part metonymy; the part-for-whole metonymy and part-for-part metonymy. At last, the author points out that this paper will illustrate the producing process of English quasi-affixes in the ICM framework in next chapter, and try to prove the hypothesis that the productive mechanism of English quasi-affixes is metonymy.Chapter Four firstly introduces the specific methods and procedures used to collect and classify the working data. And then, respective case studies of the two types of English quasi-affixes are studied carefully within the framework of ICM.In the last chapter, conclusions are reached from the analysis in the thesis and suggestions are given for the further study.