Stereotypicality: Formation Of An AP Syntactic Construction

This paper attempts to explore an English adjective syntactic construction NP + AP + to VP within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics, in stereotypical perspective in particular, aiming at seeking the motivation underlying the formation of this syntactic construction. With regard to the study of the English sentence patterns, Hornby (1959:26-97) puts forth 25 sentence patterns, adjective patterns being some of them. Since then, a great deal of researches has been done on the English syntactic constructions from the points of view of traditional grammar, structural linguistics, generative linguistics and functional linguistics, and each of them has its own way of treatment and has made its own contribution. Nevertheless, the discussions of the English adjective sentence patterns have been mainly concentrated on their use, and the aspect of the motivation of their grammaticalization has seldom been touched. This paper studies one of the English adjective sentence patterns, namely NP + AP + to VP, and it is suggested that this English adjective syntactic construction, like other English syntactic constructions, is the linguistic mapping of human perception and cognition of the world onto linguistic forms. The language structure is in nature the projection through human cognitive mechanism of the laws of objects in reality, the process of which is hypothesized in the study to be obtained usually through the stereotypical relations interweaved in syntactic constructions. From this stand, the study of the English NP + AP + to VP construction is considered not only as the process of seeking the grammatical rules of language, but also as the process of exploring the underlying motivation in the view that cognition acts as the medium between language and reality. Then, how do stereotypical relations motivate the formation and understanding of the English NP + AP + to VP construction? This is the main key theoretical question that we will tackle in this paper. This paper consists of seven parts: The first part offers a general introduction to the English adjective syntactic construction, putting forward the necessity and rationality of the study and explaining the objective, the scope and the methods of the study. The second part, based on a bird's eye view of the observation of syntactic constructions by different linguistic approaches in literature, introduces in detail the classifications of the English adjective syntactic constructions made by some grammarians and scholars. On the basis of this literature review, the key questions to be researched in this paper are mentioned. The third part deals with the theoretical framework of the study, giving a brief introduction to Construction Grammar and stereotypical relations. The fourth part suggests a new classification of the English NP + AP + to VP construction in terms of whether the adjectives describe the attribute of the entity or the property of the event, in the hope that this will serve as a reasonable preparation for a persuasive explanation of its forming motivation. The fifth and the sixth parts are centered upon the analysis of the formation motivation of the two subtypes, entity attribute construction (EAC) and event property construction (EPC) respectively with the help of the methodological aspects of cognitive study of syntactic constructions and theoretical model of stereotypical relations in a syntactic construction by Xu Shenghuan (2005:1-5). It is discovered that there is a corresponding relationship between the syntactic structure and the stereotypical relations interweaved in each of them. That is, their formation is the construal of the stereotypical relations interweaved in them, the projection of the laws of objects in reality. The last part is a summary of the thesis. It also points out that there are still some pending problems such as different views on the classification of the English NP + AP + to VP.