A Cognitive Perspective on Lexical Pragmatics: A Conceptual-Integration Analysis of the Configuration of Naxi Dongba Characters
Duan Hong and Zhong Wei apply Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Integration Theory to explain how Naxi Dongba characters -- the world's only living pictographic script -- are formed, arguing this framework overcomes lexical pragmatics' neglect of cognition and its Western-language bias. They identify two formation pathways: composition (blending two or more elements) and clipping (trimming an existing glyph). Composition subdivides into structural-assignment configuration (mapping agent/action/patient roles onto components), conceptual-joint configuration (equal-status blending, e.g. "needle and thread"), and conceptual-metaphor configuration (asymmetric blending, e.g. "black" shifting "grass" to mean "poisonous grass"). Clipping operates through sign-referent metonymy (whole pictographs) and thing-part metonymy (partial pictographs, e.g. clipping "ox" to mean "upper body"), covering roughly 69% of the 1,577-character Dongba inventory. The authors show Dongba's many analogical characters (e.g. "Han," "Bai," "Tibetan" formed from "Naxi") are generated by the same mechanism, unifying both pathways.
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