Cognitive Mechanism Of The Meaning Construction Of Echo Questions In Chinese Dialog

Echo questions,also known as repetitive questions,are a common language phenomenon in verbal communication.As early as 1940s,LüShuxiang discovered this particular language structure in Chinese,and named it as repetitive question(“??”).Since then,the study of echo questions gets started.Though many scholars like Wang Zhi,Shao Jingmin,Ding Shengshu,etc.make researches on the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic functions of echo questions,few of them make deep exploration on the cognitive mechanism of the meaning construction of echo questions.As a linguistic structure that is constructed by repeating the whole or part of the prior utterance,why are echo questions structured in this way?How can we explain that?These questions need to be addressed with valid cognitive explanation.This thesis takes dialogic syntax as the theoretical base,and studies the meaning construction of echo questions in modern Chinese.Dialogic syntax advocates the cognitive dialogicality of the meaning construction of dialog,and reveals the utterance producing mechanism: “it takes language to make language”.Research results show that the construction of an echo question and its prior utterance displays a relation of schema-instance.Schema is an abstract concept.An echo question and its prior utterance are two instances of a schema that is abstracted from them.Therefore,we can say that the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic functions of echo questions are realized by the dominance of schema through echoing the prior utterances.The research methodology and main findings are as follows:This thesis adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis,chooses Lei Yu as the source of data,and makes a comprehensive and delicate analysis of the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features of echo questions collected from it.By taking Lei Yu as the closed corpus,106 instances of echo questions are collected through manual screening.Based on dialogic syntax put forward by Du Bois(2014),this thesis adopts theory of cognitive grammar to analyze echo questions' relation with the prior utterances from syntactic,semantic and pragmatic angle.By analyzing the collected data,the author finds that an echo question,as a special structure constructed by echoing its prior utterance,parallels with its prior utterance.This structural parallelism not only activates the affinity between utterances,but pushes forward the progress of the topic.Seen from cognitive grammar,the paralleled relation between an echo question and its prior utterance invokes the cognitive mechanism of the semantic conceptualization of echo questions,that is,the prior utterance,as a specific instance,activates a schema,based on which an echo question is constructed as the instance of the schema.This process is depicted as: instance 1-(schema)-instance 2.For the syntactic features of echo questions,research results show that an echo question and its prior utterance are two specific instances of one syntactic schema,and an echo question,especially for the wh-echo questions,could be a low-level schema of its prior utterance.For the semantic features of echo questions,this thesis adopts pragmatic schema to explain.Under different contexts,utterances have different pragmatic connotations and perform different speech acts.Based on Searle's classification of illocutionary acts,this thesis concludes several pragmatic schemas to analyze in detail the semantic connection between an echo question and its prior utterance.Research results show that an echo question may perform the same speech act with its prior utterance;this speech act is exactly their shared pragmatic schema,including directive schema and assertive schema.