The Cognitive-Functional Properties of English WH-dialogic Constructions in Discourse

Abstract

Within the theoretical frameworks of cognitive linguistics and cognitive construction grammar, this papertakes 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.