Homophones in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

With the increasing prevalence of homophonic phenomena in language life, research on homophones has also received increasing attention from academia. Homophones as a rhetorical method, can assist in the implementation of many rhetorical devices, among which imitation, pun and deliberate misinterpretation are the most frequent in language life. The three have the characteristics of being similar in sounds, different in forms and meanings between the prototype and the variant in the structure of rhetorical devices, so confusion often occurs when distinguishing them.