A Study Of Construal Mechanism Of Chinese Drug Cant Within ECI Framework

Cant is a special kind of language phenomenon. According to the existing documents, it is evident that every language, in human history, has its cant. In our modern society, it still remains popular among many social groups and has gradually attracted scholars' attention and interest. Scholars at home and abroad have already studied cant from the perspective of rhetoric, folklore linguistics, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics, and fruitful achievements have been accomplished. But these studies draw great attention to its definitions, classifications, structures, functions and so on, leading to few researches on its construal mechanism. With a view to fill this blank, this thesis makes an attempt to set up a new analytical framework to reveal the cognitive interpretation process of Chinese drug cant.In this thesis, CIT and ECM serves as the theoretical bases. Through discussions about their respective strengths and weaknesses in the process of explaining the construal mechanism of drug cant, it is found that they are, to some extent, complementary to each other. Taking the interdependence of these two theories into account, this thesis proposes an analytical ECI framework, which is used to discover the cognitive interpretation process of drug cant. At the same time, a closed corpus is also built so as to ensure the objectivity and pervasiveness of the study. The data are collected from two dictionaries: Complete Collection of Chinese Cant and Chinese Jiang Hu Cant Dictionary, published academic articles(2011-2015) and online news(2011-2015). Based on the formation of cant and the relationship between cant and direct expression, this thesis attempts to categorize the data into three types. The construal mechanism of every type is analyzed by means of ECI framework. It is discovered that ECI framework is a good way to account for the construal mechanism of Chinese drug cant.As for the contributions of this thesis, there are at least two listed as follows. In the first place, this thesis, considering the inadequacy of cant study, sets up a unified Event-domain Conceptual Integration framework(ECI for short) based on Conceptual Integration Theory and Event-domain Cognitive Model in order to reveal the construal mechanism of Chinese drug cant. The second contribution lies in the establishment of a closed corpus of Chinese drug cant. The corpus, based on the formation of cant and the relationship between cant expression and direct expression, are classified into two types. The proposed ECI framework is applied to dig out the interpretation process of every type of drug cant. In the meantime, the application of ECI framework is also a good way to verify its feasibility.