Prototypical Effects Of Natural Language And Their Cognitive Motivations

Cognitive linguistics is a newly developing linguistics school of international theory linguistics circle in the recent ten years. This thesis attempts a qualitative linguistic exploration to the prototypical effects of natural language from the angle of cognitive linguistics, adopting the modern view of category—Prototype Theory to expatiate the prototypical effects of natural language and analyze the nature of their cognitive motivations.Since prototype theory was formed in late 70s in western country and introduced to orient in late 80s, it has become the research focus to many experts who are interested in it. At present, both the research at home and abroad are at the introductory period, nobody applied the theory into the language research. In addition, the thesis also goes first to holistically exploit the natural language in terms of the philosophy concept 'natural language'. The investigation on the prototypical effects of natural language is the representative and pioneer work with significant academic value.Chapter one is an introductory chapter, with a review of the backdrop of research, briefly analyzing the status quo abroad and at home. It also points out the purpose and the framework of the thesis. In chapter two, the thesis introduces the birth and development of prototype theory and has a reassessment of the classical category view. Chapter three to five as the main body and originality of the thesis follow some achievements of linguists and perform the study on the prototypical effects of natural language in morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, while it deals with analysis of the cognitive motivations at the end of each chapter. These important cognitive motivations focus on experientialism, salience, degree of similarity and attention. In Chapter three, the categories as affix, word, syntactic construction, sentence structure and supra-sentential unity have been analyzed and demarcated. In chapter four, it deals with the word meaning; latter probes into the polysemous category to have a general review of the prototypical effects in natural language. Finally, with certain important pragmatic theories, we have examined the typical pragmatic phenomena in consideration of the communicative goal, reliquidating these typical pragmatic phenomena and presenting an explicit classification.Research in macro way benefits us a lot in training our thinking, recognizing the instructive significance of theory to practical research. Based on prototype theory, this thesis has lucubrated the prototypical effects of natural language and analyzed their motivations. It is helpful for people to understand fully the nature of language as well as their language learning and teaching. It also promotes a lot to enrich the expatiation of the cognitive categorization.