A Study Of The Semantic Use Of Dialect Words In The Works Of Cao Naiqian

To the Darkness Thinking of You No Way is Cao Naiqian’s acclaimed book,which was published to the admiration of Wang Zengqi and Chen Zhongzhong,among others.The Nobel Prize jury,Ma Yueyan,gave the book high praise and said it had the ability to win the Nobel Prize for literature.The most prominent feature of this novel is that it uses dialect spoken language to describe the suffering life of the people in Yanbei area,contains rich folk culture,and has high language value and literary value.There are already scholars studying the dialectal vocabulary in Cao Naiqian’s works from the perspective of linguistics,but the results are few,mainly from the microscopic perspective of explaining individual dialectal words or analyzing the relationship between dialectal vocabulary and culture.No research has been carried out to date to systematically sort out and analyse the dialectal vocabulary in Cao Naiqian’s novels from a cognitive and pragmatic perspective.In this paper,207 dialect words are selected from "To the Darkness Thinking of You No Way" with the help of dictionaries and other tools,and are systematically organized and classified.Combining cognitive linguistic theories,we explore three aspects of dialect lexical examples,semantic derivation and pragmatic functions.Seeking to remove the reader’s barriers to reading,it explores the value of the dialect vocabulary’s contribution to the work.The introduction introduces the source of the topic,the background of the study,the current status of the study,and describes the significance of the study,the research method,the content of the study and the sources of the corpus.The first chapter illustrates the principles of defining and selecting dialect vocabulary,provides examples of dialect vocabulary from a cognitive perspective,and summarises the characteristics of dialect vocabulary and its inclusion in dictionaries.The second chapter examines the semantic derivation of dialect words in the work,exploring the mechanisms of semantic derivation of dialect words from a cognitive perspective.The third chapter analyses the role of dialectal vocabulary in the novel from a pragmatic perspective.This section focuses on the thematic,affective,humorous and euphemistic,and accentuative functions of dialectal vocabulary in the work,as well as the venting,bantering and abusive functions of dialectal insults.Conclusion,summarising the paper’s ideas,conclusions,innovations and reflecting on the paper’s shortcomings.The study found that,first of all,the dialect vocabulary in the novel "To the darkness of the night I can’t help thinking of you" is characterized by four features:the extension of archaic word meanings,a special lexical order,overlapping and additional word constructions,and extension of meaning.Among the main ways in which word meanings can be derived from a cognitive perspective are metaphor and metonymy.In addition,some of the dialect words in the work suffer from misspellings and are not included in the dictionary.Secondly,the metaphorical derivation of the semantics of the dialectal vocabulary in the work is in the form of semantic derivation from the concrete to the specific,such as cold eggs,pulling side sets.There are semantic derivations from the concrete to the abstract,such as suing grass and yelling fog;there are semantic derivations from the abstract to the concrete,which are less common in this type of dialect,such as Master Tai Sin;and there are also derivations of orientation metaphors,such as the following puddle.The works contain the most dialect words semantically derived in a metaphorical manner and related to the conceptual domain of action.Finally,some dialect words have meanings that cannot be conveyed in Mandarin,and in fictional contexts they have a revealing thematic function,an emotional function,a humorous and euphemistic function,a highlighting function,and dialect insults have a venting,bantering and abusive function.