The Application Of Blending Theory In Delimitation Of Chinese Compound

Conceptual blending theory, first proposed by Fauconnier, is an important part of cognitive linguistics. Based on the analysis of human thinking capacity, this theory has great explanatory power of a wide range of social and cultural phenomena. This thesis aims to analyze the Chinese compounds in terms of their complexity of meaning and to solve the delimitation problem from the perspective of blending theory.The delimitation and definition of Chinese compounds has always been a controversial topic for their complexity in meaning. Seemingly simple form usually contains rather complicated meaning. Lv Shuxiang(1964-1965) has pointed out that some of the expressive meaning of language is explicit, some is implicit. It is just like a war—occupying a spot gives people dominant power over a large area. Chinese compounds are best examples of this kind. Different ways of construction can yield different meanings. For example, the meanings of the morpheme"butterfly"are quite different in compounds like"butterfly speckle"(蝴蝶斑) and"butterfly valve"(蝴蝶阀), since it means"resembling the shape of s butterfly"in the former while"resembling the ways of movement of a butterfly"in the latter. This is largely due to the fact that only two out of the numerous factors in a certain scene can be selected as morphemes to construct a compound. In this way, most linguistic information becomes background knowledge. Therefore the relation between its morphemes is vital to the comprehension of the compound and the degree of closeness of such relations can be regarded as a criterion to distinguish compounds from phrases. The thesis analyzed the blending process of Chinese compounds construction and categorize them into four types. During the study it is found that the four types of blending—simplex, mirror, single-scope and double-scope networks—largely correspond to the ways of Chinese compound construction. For this reason, we could put forward a hypothesis that the four blending types can be used as criteria to form a hierarchy of a continuum—from typical to non-typical compound. What's more, in the thesis the weakness of Zhu Yan's explanation of compound construction process is...