Understanding Chinese Xiehouyu

This thesis provides a pragmatic analysis of Chinese Xiehouyu (XHYs) within the relevance-theoretic framework originating from relevance theory. The use of XHYs in verbal communication is an intriguing language phenomenon in the Chinese language. Many a Chinese scholar has conducted a large variety of researches on various aspects of XHYs and has scored great achievements. Most of the previous studies focus on the description of XHYs. The deficiency of the interpretative approach to XHYs studies inspires us to propose an explanatory perspective. In this study, we argue that differences between categories of XHYs determine the psychological-cognitive procedures people undertake to understand them. Therefore, by extensively reading and analyzing the XHY-studies-related literature, we are in the position to classify XHYs into two categories: Category I and II according to whether homonyms are applied in the second part of XHYs. With homonyms being used in XHYs, more factors have to be considered in order to figure out the intended meaning. Thus here comes the presumption that homonyms take the audience more cognitive procedures to find out the optimal assumptions than to deal with the XHYs without homonyms used within. In other words, XHYs containing homonyms require more processing efforts to understand. With an eye to offer a clear picture regarding the process of XHY understanding, tentative patterns are developed accordingly. In order to justify our categorization and the feasibility of the patterns for XHY understanding, an E-Prime experiment is carried out within 67 subjects. The reaction time recorded indicates how many cognitive procedures people automatically undertake to understand those examined XHYs. The experimental results verify our hypothetical claims by analyzing the disparity of the reaction time. Hence, we've successfully interpreted XHY understanding within a relevance-theoretic framework.