A Cognitive Study On Chinese Cnac In Literary Works

The collocation of classifier and noun is one of the important and outstanding characteristics of Chinese language and even the whole Sino-Tibetan system. The study on Classifier—Noun Collocation began comparatively late and was ignored for its simple form during the period of Formal Grammar. In the recent ten years, with the development of semantic and cognitive studies, the unique value of this structure comes out and becomes the hot topic of Chinese language research. However, The study on Chinese Classifier—Noun Anomalous Collocation (we use the abbreviation "Chinese CNAC" for convenience) is still far from satisfaction.The current research adopts a cognitive linguistic approach, which is known to have the capacity to interpret how the speaker/hearer conceptualizes the world in the construal of the world on the basis of his/her embodied experience. Chinese CNAC, an important subject of Cognitive Linguistics, mirrors in reality man's ideas of the categories into which nouns are grouped. As Cognitive Linguistics takes the relationship between language and human beings' cognition as its objective, the study on Chinese CNAC structures from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics will be necessary and worthwhile.Based on previous studies on Chinese CNAC structures, at first, this thesis attempts to apply Imagery Theories to the analysis of the rhetoric functions of Chinese CNAC structures. And then, Conceptual Metaphor Theory is used to explain what kind of cognitive mechanisms are at work behind the generation of Chinese CNAC structures. The semantic relationships between classifier and noun are discussed and a new classification toward this deviant language structure is given in this thesis. At last, as for the analysis of the interpretation process of Chinese CNAC structures, Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) is supposed to offer a convincible explanation. This thesis conducts a detailed research into the conceptual blending process undertaken in our brain during Chinese CNAC interpretation. The important factors that are supposed to influence the blending process are also discussed in this thesis. We believe that this study will be conducive to the understanding of Chinese CNAC structures.To sum up, the cognitive approach to the study of Chinese CNAC structures adopted in this thesis can not only reveal the backstage cognition involved in the generation and interpretation of Chinese CNAC structures, but also help us to figure out the complicated relationships within language and cognition.