Cognitive Analysis On Chinese Adjective Reduplication

Reduplication now is frequently used in many languages, especially in Chinese. Adjective reduplication in Mandarin Chinese is widely accepted and used by people in their daily life. This thesis is an attempt to explore this phenomenon from cognitive perspective aiming at finding out the motivations behind its generation and the construal mechanism of meaning transformation and functional shift with the methods of inductive reasoning and abductive reasoning. The thesis consists of six chapters in all:Chapter one offers an introduction of the thesis, including preliminary remarks, the objectives, the methodology as well as the organization of this thesis. Chapter two is the literature review of the studies on similar topics. In this chapter, the author concludes some meaningful and influential achievements made by other scholars. These achievements can be classified into three categories, which are achievements on forms, meanings and functions of adjective reduplication. From these previous conclusions, the author proposes three unresolved problems and makes them research questions of this thesis.Chapter three provides an academic background of this research. First, it introduces the term"cognitive"and some knowledge about cognitive linguistics. Then, it lays out two important principles and theories in cognitive linguistics: quantity iconicity and decategorization, which provides the basis for later theoretical analysis. Meanwhile, it makes clear the conception of the term"motivation"in summary.Chapter four focuses on the variety of forms of adjective reduplication and some factors to explain why there are so many different forms of adjective reduplication. First, it displays six familiar forms of adjective reduplication with examples from our daily life. After that, it analyzes the reasons for the existence of so many types of forms from three perspectives.Chapter five tries to explore the meaning transformation after adjectives being reduplicated and also the cognitive motivation of this phenomenon. It concludes three main meanings of reduplicated forms followed by the analysis of meaning transformation with quantity iconicity, one of the three principles of iconicity.Chapter six is about grammatical and syntactic functions of adjective reduplication. Firstly, it exhibits two grammatical and syntactic functions of reduplicated adjective that are different from those before reduplicated. Then, the theory of linguistic decategorization is used to construe the theoretical foundation for motivation of the functional shift.The last part is the conclusion of the thesis. In this part, major findings, limitations and future study directions are stated.