Metonymic Mechanism In Grammaticalization Of Progressive Aspect

This thesis is mainly to introduce a metonymic interpretation of progressive aspect in grammaticalization of English and Chinese verbs. By a comparative study of progressive aspect of English and Chinese verbs, we discover that progressive aspect in these two languages could express other aspectual meanings. This thesis explains the inner reason why progressive aspect could indicate the meaning of other aspects from the perspective of grammaticalization by adopting the theory of metonymy. The former research on grammaticalization mainly focuses on morphosyntax, i.e. content words becoming grammatical, which mainly discusses clitic and the origin of affix. On the basis of former research on grammaticalization this thesis intensively discusses the grammaticalization of aspect category. This study is on grammaticalization issue from less grammatical to more grammatical. The research in this thesis is done in the theory of grammaticalization and metonymic mechanism of Cognitive Linguistics, combined with the research method of corpus-based data collection. By analyzing English and Chinese languages this thesis attempts to explain how the metonymic mechanism works in the process of grammaticalization of progressive aspect, in other words, to illustrate the functional expansion of progressive aspect of English and Chinese verbs. This thesis has given a specific investigation on which types of verbs of different languages will give rise to functional expansion of progressive aspect and which kinds of verbs'progressive aspect will have a higher degree of grammaticalization.The whole thesis is divided into five chapters. The structure of the thesis is organized as follows: Chapter One is introduction. It mainly introduces research background, research significance and foundation. On the other hand this chapter presents the research question, research methods, and the framework of this thesis is also introduced in this chapter.Chapter Two is literature review. It firstly introduces the research of scholars at home and abroad on grammaticalization, metonymy and metonymy as one of mechanisms of grammaticalization. Besides it discusses what the former scholars have studied regarding grammatical category: aspect, especially progressive aspect. At last this chapter reviews the previous research on the related theory and makes a full preparation of theoretical reference for the writing of the thesis. The core of the thesis is formed in Chapter Three and Chapter Four, in which the major concepts utilized in the study of grammaticaliztion of progressive aspect are introduced and discussed. Chapter Three mainly uses the corpus of English and Chinese verbs to describe the features of grammaticalization of progressive aspect of verbs in English and Chinese. In the above description this chapter reveals how metonymic mechanism explains the process of grammaticaliztion of progressive aspect in different languages. And meanwhile the research plan is discussed in this chapter.Chapter Four discusses in great detail the research question, already outlined in Chapter Three, which discusses briefly metonymic mechanism in grammaticalization of progressive aspect. This chapter gives examples of various kinds of verbs of English and Chinese to illustrate the metonymic explanation of grammaticalization of progressive aspect.The conclusion is reached in Chapter Five, i.e. metonymy, as one of mechanisms of grammaticalization, could act in the process of functional changes of progressive aspect. At the same time the remaining questions are put forward for the further research.From the above research this thesis finds that there is similar grammaticaliztion law with morphosyntax in aspect category. Progressive aspect itself has been grammaticalized. In my study the function of progressive aspect is expanded in some concrete contexts, and it can express the meaning of other aspects. For instance, progressive aspect of momentary verbs could indicate the meaning of perfective aspect; progressive aspect of transitional event verbs could express the meaning of inchoative aspect. Aspect category is a cognitive domain in which there are progressive aspect, perfective aspect, simple aspect and inchoative aspect and so on. The relation among them is contiguity. In concrete contexts metonymic mapping is generated between progressive aspect and other aspects, when the function of progressive aspect has been expanded and it is further grammaticalized. This study breaks through the scope of morphosyntax in grammaticalization, providing some reference value for the theory of grammaticalization.