| As the recorder and microscope of social changes,new words and expressions embody the annual changes of linguistic forms and the hot spots of society.They record the new things,new concepts as well as new situations having appeared in a certain year.In the list of annual media new words and expressions released by the Ministry of Education from 2006 to 2017,the number of trisyllable formal units has always been in a dominant position.Although its "blowout" way of development has attracted some scholars’ attention,current studies on Chinese new trisyllable formal units are mostly focused on their sounds,grammatical structures,semantic meanings and lexicalization.So far,few studies have carried out from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics to explore their formal unit concepts,meaning constructions and pragmatic functions.Based on conceptualization theory,mental spaces theory and formal unit concept frame theory,this thesis employs qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the classification,meaning construction and pragmatic functions of 520 Chinese new trisyllable formal units,which are picked out from the list of annual media new words and expressions in Language Situation in China from 2015 to 2017.Three research questions are involved in this thesis:(1)How can Chinese new trisyllable formal units be classified?(2)How are the meanings of Chinese new trisyllable formal units constructed?(3)What are the pragmatic functions of Chinese new trisyllable formal units?Three conclusions can be drawn in this thesis:(1)According to their ways of formation,Chinese new trisyllable formal units can be divided into seven types:compounding form,attached form,blended form,code-mixed form,homophonic form,overlapping form and neology form.According to their formal structures,Chinese new trisyllable formal units can be further classified into six types:single morpheme structure,modifier-head structure,coordinate structure,subject-predicate structure,predicate-object structure as well as predicate-complement structure.According to their formal unit concepts,Chinese new trisyllable formal units can be divided into formal units of thing concepts and formal units of event concepts.(2)The processes of meaning construction are mainly on-line and dependent on specific context.Conceptual metonymy is the most commonly used cognitive operation.Chinese new trisyllable formal units representing thing concepts and representing event concepts have different meaning construction processes and formal structures.(3)The cognitive motivations of Chinese new trisyllable formal units mainly are cognitive economy,innovative expressing,subjective and objective profiling.The main pragmatic effects of that are colloquial style,strong rhythm,effort saving,vividness and ridicule.Through the cognitive pragmatic study on Chinese new trisyllable formal units,this thesis holds that the classification on Chinese new trisyllable formal units in terms of formal unit concepts is indispensable.Both the generation and understanding of Chinese new trisyllable formal units require the support of wide conceptual knowledge structures.The cognitive motivations behind their generations can help us know about the basic reasons for their increasing numbers.These newly formed trisyllable formal units are usually with certain pragmatic effects. |
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