A Cognitive Study Of Semantic Enrichment In �you+N� Structure

"You" is a high frequency verb in mandarin, which includes many meanings:occurring, appearing; large quantity etc. and "you + N" structures express "existence" or "possession, for example, "you" in you zhuo zi'there are desks'means existential relation; "you" in wo you shu'I have books'means possessive relation. But in mandarin some of the "you+N" structures become to express the speaker's subjective evaluations, for example, you tou nao not only means "somebody has a head or brain" but also means that "somebody is intelligent" du zi li "you mo shui"means "somebody is knowledgeable"; yuan zhang qian le zi jiu "you xi' means "hope or possibility". This phenomenon is called semantic enrichment, which is the subject of this thesis.There are a lot of descriptive studies of "you+N" structure from grammatical approach, but research from cognitive approach is scares and they didn't cover semantic generation and cognitive mechanism of this structure.This thesis tries to give a comprehensive explanation on the semantic relationship and the mechanism of nouns'semantic enrichment in "you+N" structure by using cognitive linguistics theories like metonymy, cognitive frame and noun's quantitative characteristics etc. The nouns in "you+N" structures become to express the speaker's subjective evaluations because of metonymy. What's more, the nouns in the structures have quantitative characteristics. This thesis finds that N, which has to have quantity characteristic, after entering this structure, becomes unbounded and can't be modified by quantifiers through the process of metonymy., thus making the N to express the new use of subjective mood; The cognitive elements in frames activated by the noun in this structure and the phrases before "you" are correlated, without reference to N's frame, the representation of meaning can't be realized. The concepts activated by N are more than the combination of semantic representation, which is the generation process of enriched meaning and its cognitive mechanism is a CONCRETE for ABSTRACT metonymy.