A Study Of The Homophonic Two-Part Allegorical Sayings From The Cognitive-Dialogic Perspective

The two-part allegorical sayings are a kind of special Chinese language form.Among them,the homophonic two-part allegorical sayings(the HTPASs for short)account for a large proportion.Although they have been explored from rhetorical,semantic and cognitive and pragmatic perspectives based on linear syntax,no systemic studies on the HTPASs are carried out under the framework of Dialogic Syntax.In view of this,this thesis first made a thorough retrieval of 6504 pieces of the HTPASs in A Complete Collection of Chinese Two-part Allegorical Sayings complied by Wen Duanzheng,then removing the data whose homophonic words in the second part do not belong to Mandarin as well as the data which couch the same meaning with the similar structure,and eventually 567 pieces of the HTPASs are selected to build a closed corpus.By adopting quantitative and qualitative methodologies,a new model termed EBR~+(Event-based Blending and Resonance Theory)is proposed based on Event-domain Cognitive Model,Blending theory and resonance to analyze their cognitive-dialogic mechanism as well as syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features from a new perspective.Hopefully,this thesis can provide a tentative perspective for future studies in related areas.Through data analysis,this thesis points out:First,the HTPASs belong to the phenomenon of Dialogic Syntax.The original second part(before using homonyms)reproduces partial linguistic resources of the first part,and there is semantic resonance between them.In addition,phonetic resonance lies in the original and final second part(after using homonyms).Second,the generation of the real meaning of the HTPASs experiences the first step of producing the original second part through blending the relevant information of the elements in the first part and then using homophony in the second part to form the final second part.The first part and the original second part both belong to the same event domain while the final second part belongs to a completely different one.More specifically,there exists phonetic resonance and word resonance at syntactic level and the former is further categorized into resonance produced through words pronounced identically and similarly and the latter is divided into resonance activated by all the core elements or merely by one of the core elements in the event domain(the first part).At semantic level,resonance is classified into complete resonance,abundant resonance and partial resonance,without zero one.Besides,each piece of the HTPASs embraces two propositions(the original second part and the final second part).At the level of pragmatics,the HTPASs conform to the“Economic Principle”,Indirect Speech Act theory and they also bear embodiment and novelty.In brief,the HTPASs are in line with the core principle of cognitive linguistics,“Reality-Cognition-Language”.The research significance of the study is as follows.To begin with,this study investigates the HTPASs in A Complete Collection of Chinese Two-part Allegorical Sayings in detail,which can provide a better understanding of the HTPASs for people.Second,this thesis constructs a theoretical model from cognitive-dialogic perspective to systematically analyze the HTPASs’mechanism of resonance and semantic generation,which offers a new perspective for future researches.Third,this study can enlighten lexicographers to offer interpretations of the HTPASs from a new angle.