Guocai Zeng
Sichuan University
Negative answers are common types of responsive expressions to English wh-questions. From the theoretical perspective of Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics (Wang, 2014) and the dialogic view on meaning construction, this study takes English wh-dialogues with negative answers as the research object and regards such dialogues as a special group of dialogic constructions in conversation. This paper gives an account of the embodied properties of the semantic grounding process of dialogic focuses in such constructions, in terms of the types of the semantic grounding and the categories of semantic consistency of focal parts of wh-questions with those of negative answers, with the ultimate goal to decipher the cognitive mechanism by which wh-dialogues with negative answers are produced and construed in linguistic communication.
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