Guocai Zeng
College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Sichuan University
Within the theoretical frameworks of cognitive linguistics and cognitive construction grammar, this paper takes the pair of a WH-question and one of its answers in contemporary spoken English as the research object and regards such pairs as WH-dialogic constructions. In this study we construct an Event-based Schema-Instance Cognitive Model (ESI model) to analyze the cognitive-functional properties of this category of dialogic constructions. The discoursal expansion and textual cohesion in discourse achieved through the application of such dialogic constructions indicate that the usage of WH-dialogic constructions is one of the basic cognitive strategies for human beings to construe the objective world.
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Copyright © 2019 Guocai Zeng
This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
