A Cognitive Study Of The Omission And Occurrence Of De In Mandarin Chinese Multiple-attributive Nominal Phrases

As the most frequently-used function word in modern Chinese language,the omission and occurrence rules of de(?)is a complicated question for Chinese linguists.From 1950 s,this question has got a broad attention.Scholars have made a detailed study of the omission and occurrence rules of de from different perspectives and point out that the omission and occurrence of de are relevant with syntax,semantics,syllable numbers,pragmatics,etc.Those studies lay a good foundation for the author to further reveal the deep mechanism of the occurrence rules of de.But Chinese linguists have not formed a unified view or find a relatively specific rule to generalize the omission and occurrence rules of de in the multiple-attributive nominal phrases.Most previous studies center on the omission and occurrence rules of de in the single-attributive nominal phrases.Most studies of the omission and occurrence rules of de in the multiple-attributive nominal phrases center on the syntactic level.Little efforts have been made to investigate the cognitive mechanism of the omission and occurrence of de in the multiple-attributive nominal phrases.The study aims at answering the following three questions: 1.What are multiple attributes? 2.How about the omission and occurrence of de in the multiple-attributive nominal phrases? 3.What cognitive factors that limit the omission and occurrence of de in the multiple-attributive nominal phrases?The study chooses the multiple-attributive nominal phrases as the research object to investigate the omission and occurrence of de.Zhang Min makes an explanation of the omission and occurrence rules of de in the single-attributive nominal phrases in his famous book Cognitive Linguistics and Chinese Noun Phrases from cognitive perspectives.In the book,the Distance Iconicity Motivation enlightens this study.The author adopts the Iconicity Principle and the Economy Principle from cognitive perspectives,to make an explanation of the omission and occurrence of de and try to explore the deep mechanism over the syntactic level.To guarantee the scientificity of the study,based on Corpus Linguistics,the author adopts a qualitative and quantitative combined method.First,the data comes from the modern Chinese corpus of the Beijing University Chinese Linguistics Research Centers.The author uses the key word de to search and gets 64800 pieces of linguistic data.The author randomly extracts 10800 pieces of linguistic data as analyzing objectives.Then this study excludes de in the single-attributive nominal phrases,de at the end of sentences and de in non multiple-attributive nominal phrases.Detailed analysis is made on the omission and occurrence of de in coordinate multiple-attributive nominal phrases and in progressively increasing multiple-attributive nominal phrases.According to the definition of annotative attribute and denotative attribute by Liu Danqing,the author annotates sentences that include two or more connotative attributes,and analyze them by term numbers.Finally,according to the number of de in each term and the syntactic position of de,the author gets conclusions about the omission and occurrence of de and makes cognitive analysis.Cognitive Linguistics is based on our experience of the world,our perception of the world and the method and strategy we use to conceptualize the world.Cognitive Linguistics is obedient to the usage-based view of language and holds the view that language use constructs language knowledge.The study is based on this hypothesis.The author holds that de may appear many times in the multiple-attributive nominal phrases because of the Iconicity Principle.The Iconicity Principle asks for the similarity between the perceived reality and language element and structure,that is to say,the correspondence of form and meaning.However,de does not appear in most of multiple-attributive nominal phrases because of the Economy Principle.The Economy Principle asks for the least cognitive effort to get the maximum communicative effect,and its immediate effect is the simplification of the language form.The omission and occurrence of de in the multiple-attributive nominal phrases are the result of the competition between the Economy Principle and the Iconicity Principle.Multiple-attributive nominal phrases tend to bring as less de as possible under the condition that meaning of the attribute-head phrases is complete.