“Yao X You X” Construction: A Cognitive Pragmatic Study

“Yao X You X” construction as a kind of marked construction is frequently used in daily communication. However so far there barely has been any specific case study on it. In linguistic research, the analysis of “Yao X You X” construction is mainly focused on the study of related constructions, such as “Yao Duo X You Duo X”, “X Jiu Bu Yong Shuo Le”, “Zhen X”, and the study of contracted constructions. There has not been a specific study on “Yao X You X” construction. Based on Goldberg’s construction grammar, this thesis conducts a study on “Yao X You X” construction.Through the analysis of the constructional meaning of “Yao X You X” construction and meanings of its components “Yao”, “You” and “X”, we find “Yao X You X” structure conforms to Goldberg’s definition of construction and is a form-meaning or form-function pair. “Yao X You X” construction conveys senses of subjective evaluation, positiveness and emphasis, and has the semantic characteristics of non-eventness and virtuality. Constant “Yao” has a strong sense of subjectivity, and constant “You” has a weak sense of evaluation. Variable “X” in “Yao X You X” construction can be bare nouns, interrogative pronouns “Duoshao” and “Shenme” and some other pronouns. This thesis also explores the integration mechanism of “Yao X You X” construction, which is in essence a contracted construction made up of two contracted items “Yao X” and “You X”. It profiles the logical-semantic relation between the former item and the latter item. When the verbs “Yao” and “You” have the same subject which is the subject of “Yao X You X” construction, participant roles of the verbs fuse perfectly with the argument roles of the construction; when the subject of “Yao X You X” construction is only the subject of the latter contracted item “You X”, participant roles of the verbs cannot fuse with the argument roles of the construction. We believe the reason is that the “Yaoer” role of “Yao” is shaded by “Yao X You X” construction, and its constructional meaning lays more emphasis on the latter contracted item. The cognitive cause for “Yao X You X” construction is the principle of thought economy, and the cognitive mechanism for it is haplology.In this thesis, Chapter One mainly introduces the motivation and significance, research questions, methodology, data collection and layout of the thesis. Chapter Two reviews correlative studies home and abroad and gaps in previous studies. Chapter Three introduces the theoretical framework of “Yao X You X” construction. Chapter Four identifies “Yao X You X” structure as a construction and analyzes its constructional meaning, syntactic composition, pragmatic cause and functions. Chapter Five explores the nature of “Yao X You X” construction and analyzes the integration of verbs and construction, relations of constructions, cognitive cause and mechanism of “Yao X You X” construction. Chapter Six mainly concludes the findings, implications, limitations and suggestions.