Investigation Into Chinese Verb Reduplication From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Reduplication is an important linguistic device in Modern Chinese and some dialects in China. Although Chinese is an impoverished-inflectional language, it's rich in reduplication especially verb reduplication. Verb reduplication fully reflects the diversity and flexibility of the language of Chinese. Ever since the early days of 1920s, Chinese verb reduplication has attracted linguists'attention and it has been a research focus in the field of Chinese linguistics for a long time; nevertheless it seems that our precursors pay too much attention on observation and description of the phenomenon, and we can hardly find any insightful explanation about its motivation. Contemporary linguists'investigations into Chinese verb reduplication are mainly involving following three aspects: verb reduplication's format, meaning and constraint. In spite of remarkable achievements problems still reside in their study. The intention of this thesis is to seek after possible answer for those open questions and arrive at a more insightful explanation of the linguistic facts. We hope that through studying its semantic and syntactic characteristics we could achieve a satisfactory explanation of its motivation from Cognitive Linguistic perspective.With the adoption of literature search, the paper makes use of Decategorization Theory and Iconicity Theory to explore two meaning transfers of Chinese verb reduplication by comparison with the archetypal verbs: (1) from expressing activity to expressing imperfective aspect; (2) from signifying unitary quantity to signifying bidirectional quantity. In order to explicate the iconic characteristic of"more of from stands for more of content"we borrow the concept of vector from mathematics; and we apply Decategorization Theory to explain the decategorization process of Chinese verb reduplication's quantity meaning—from boundedness to unboundedness. Both of these are evidences of Chinese verb reduplication's motivation within the theoretical background of Cognitive Linguistics.