On The Construal Mechanism Of Chinese Couplet-from The Perspective Of Embodied Humenism

Chinese couplet enjoys the status of being an independent literary genre in literary history and plays a ubiquitous role in people’s daily life, which draws wide attention from a great many scholars. Former scholars have achieved much by conducting the analysis of Chinese Couplet from stylistic perspective, pedagogical perspective, translating perspective, sociolinguistic perspective and pragmatic perspective. However, most of the studies are of descriptive nature, which do the work of listing or classification and so on. Some research is based on personal experience without theoretic support. In addition, research made from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics with data support is insufficient.In light of shortcomings of previous studies, this paper constructs a model termed as BEE Model(Blending-Event-Domain Embodiment Model) based on Conceptual Blending Theory, Event-domain Cognitive Model and Embodiment to explore the construal mechanism of Chinese couple under the background of CL(Cognitive Linguistics) and post-modern philosophy. Besides, it aims to prove the feasibility of BEE model with the support of data obtained from a closed corpus. 600 pieces of Chinese couplet whose number of character varies from four to eight collected from the Baidu website is classified into seven types with reference to event domain structure. Through applying BEE model to analyze each variation, the study shows the newly proposed model is powerful in explaining construal mechanism of Chinese couplet. The analysis of the data demonstrates:1. B-A-B type occupies the highest percentage of the whole data, which is closely related to our embodiment base. One action is more likely to be related to the agent which emits it and the patient which receives the force.2. B-A type, A-B type, B-A-B type highlight different participant roles, with the former profiling agent and action, the middle profiling action and patient while the latter enforcing prominence on agent, action and patient.3. Being-without-action type discovered in the database is not fully consistent with ECM where A and B are indispensible elements. The paper argues writers of Chinese couplet hide action while profile being to the largest extent, reflecting they adopt Summary Scanning in the process of Visual Scanning apart from Sequential Scanning.4. The more complex event domain structure is, the larger the number of Chinese couplet’s character is, which is in line with number iconicity theory.5. The following types including B-A-B type, A-B type, B-A type,being-without-action type and inner-relation type manifest human being’s cognitive processing mechanism of part for whole.6. The deficiency of Conceptual Blending theory in accounting for meaning construction and the insufficiency of the direct realism of the Greeks neglecting humanism are criticized by the study.Contribution of the thesis lies in:1. For the first time, the author proposes one integrated theoretical model under the background of post-modern philosophy in an attempt to reveal construal mechanism of Chinese couplet with reference to inadequacies of previous studies on Chinese couplet.2. A closed-corpus of Chinese couplet is established for the first time,according to which, seven types of data are categorized and BEE model is applied to dig into the construal mechanism of each variation. The study proves the validity of BEE model.Meanwhile, it also points out shortcomings of the study and makes suggestions for further investigation into Chinese Couplet.