A Cognitive Semantic Study Of Marriage Custom Formal Units In Chinese

Getting married is one of the four happy events in one's life in China and marriage custom is an interesting topic for humanities and social sciences.Previous studies on Chinese marriage custom are mainly from the perspective of cultural implication,historical changes,functions and procedures,which has made fruitful achievements and laid a solid foundation for this thesis.Through thousands of years' development,Chinese marriage custom has formed a comprehensive system,while there are few researches on the marriage custom formal units,let alone from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Under the guidance of theories of conceptual structures and theories of cognitive operations,this thesis explores the ways of meaning construction of marriage custom formal units in Chinese and their additional meanings by employing quantitative study method and qualitative study method.Based on the collection of corpus,this thesis takes marriage custom formal units in Chines as the research objects of which marriage custom formal units of the Han people are the most.At first,the thesis classifies the marriage custom formal units in Chinese according to formal structures and formal unit concepts,and then analyzes and explains the ways of meaning construction of marriage custom formal units.And last but not least,this thesis summarizes the cultural and social additional meanings of marriage custom formal units in Chinese.From different classification standards,this thesis discovers that modifier-head structures and verb-object structures account for a large proportion(94.1%in total)according to formal structures;concrete thing concepts and event concepts take up the largest number(81.8%in total)of concepts from the perspective of formal unit concepts.The reason is that getting married involves many rituals activities and objects,which carry rich and profound Chinese culture.Based on the classification of marriage custom formal units in Chinese,this thesis makes an analysis and explanation to the ways of meaning construction of marriage custom formal units in Chinese,namely by way of conceptual metonymy,by way of conceptual metaphor,by way of metaphtonymy and by way of direct stating.The author also finds out that conceptual metonymy and direct stating are the main means of the meaning construction of both thing concepts and events concepts.Furthermore,this thesis discovers that except the basic meaning,marriage custom formal units in Chinese carry rich additional meanings,which mainly reflect in cultural and social aspects.Their cultural additional meaning can be summarized as follows:best wishes to the newlyweds from relatives and friends,Chinese's pursuit of festivities and auspiciousness,wish for having babies soon,and the pursuit of happy and prosperous life;their social additional meanings can be classified into three categories:newlyweds and their families'hope for achieving social approval,newlyweds' transformation of social roles and the establishment of social network.