Basic-level Category In Cognitive Linguistics And Its Applications In EFL Research

Categorization is a mental process of classification and it is fundamental to all higher cognitive activity. Linguistic categorization remains a major topic in Cognitive Linguistics. Yet there exists insufficient attention to basic-level category. This paper attempts to explain and discuss several issues, which include basic-level category, basic-level terms and abstract category and the possible applications of basic-level category in EFL research.The first three chapters give a detailed review of theoretical underpinnings of the present research. The concept of categorization and relevant theories, ranging from Aristotle's Classic Theory of Categorization to contemporary issues about linguistic categorization were fully explained to lay a solid foundation to the further analysis of the topic. The last five chapters were devoted to the application of basic–level category in EFL research, which covers object omission, cognate objects, middle constructions , animal and plant metaphors respectively.Researchers have long noted that the omission of an object in English is verb-sensitive. However, a classic Phrase Structure account in grammar books fails to explain the reasons why some verbs permit omitted objects and some do not. The aim of the present paper is to explain this phenomenon from the point of view of cognitive linguistics. The study is based on the theory of basic-level category .The study shows objects that can be omitted tend to be neither super-ordinate nor subordinate terms, but those basic-level terms which give proper information for us to infer the omitted objects from a very narrow range of possibilities. It may provide a better understanding to object omission and the basis for pedagogical implication.Cognate object is a special language phenomenon in English. When an object is lexically cognate with its verb, and it tends to repeat the meaning of the verb, such construction is called cognate object. It is difficult to confine the occurrence of cognate objects in English to a regular small subset of verbs as is the case in other languages. Cognate object constructions are relatively infrequent across languages and, when present, they are restricted to a limited range of semantic and syntactic domains. In this paper, the author analyzes cognate object from a new perspective—basic-level category, for a better understanding to this language phenomenon.Middle constructions are also called middle voice due to its position between passive and active voice. There are mainly two different sayings about the formation of middle constructions, the movement approach and lexical approach, which only explains part of the issue. The present paper analyzes the structural and semantic features of common English middle constructions and tries to prove the following two points: The verbs in middle constructions are all basic-level verbs and the event described by the middle constructions are basic-level events.Animal and plant metaphors are abundant in English and Chinese. The paper analyzed the ground and the origin between source and target domains of animal and plant metaphors through the basic-level category. This paper collected and analyzed metaphors of animal and plant basic-level words and it resulted in two schemas which rooted in the mapping theory and which presented the relationships between human and animals /plants, the relationships between animal/plant metaphors and social connections.The results show that in various levels of language, ranging from word level, syntactic level to more abstract metaphorical level, there exists a basic level. Basice-level cateogory plays an important role in human recognition and does a great help to acquisition and comprehension of language as well. The study might be helpful to both Chinese and EFL research.