The Cognitive Analyses On Null Object

Since VO construction plays an important role in language communication, Null Object attracts a lot of researchers'attention. Both Generative and Cognitive Linguistics approach this problem with suggestions, and their analyses did make great contributions to the research of VO construction. While leaving many questions open, there still needs further and deeper discussion about the category and cognitive motivations of null objects.Numerous experts presented studies on their understanding of Null Object and approach it from different angles. Most of the generative researchers who analyze null objects focused their attention on syntactic matters (e.g. Chomsky 1986), or on the specific lexical properties of the verb itself (e.g. Rice 1988). On the other hand, cognitive linguists approached the issue from different perspectives, such as Fillmore (1986) analyzed the object noun phrase as crucial factors allowing object omission and then divided the verbs involved in null objects into three groups. Goldberg (2001, 2005) argued from the constructional approach that omission of the patient argument is a result of the semantics of the construction itself as well as a result of the pragmatic factors including the context and discourse. As for the relative research, Chinese scholars tried to give explanations to null objects from the perspective of metonymy, for instance Wang Zhanhua (2000) implied the Metonymy Theory to the VO construction such as"chi shi tang"in Chinese.Inspired by Langacker's cognitive approach, this thesis mainly discusses the cognitive motivation of Null Object. Form the perspectives of Prominence Theory and Metonymy Theory, we analyzed null objects in English and detailed them in Chinese, a topic prominent language in nature, and expect to give a new explanation to them.It is generally accepted in Cognitive Linguistics that language is not an autonomous system, and its syntactic constructions are greatly effected by semantic and pragmatic factors. Therefore viewed as a whole, we believe that Null Object involves many linguistic fields such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, cognition, etc. In this thesis, we divided Null Object into three categories, namely: Implicit Object, Empty Object, and Omitted Conventional Object, with their own different cognitive motivations and factors.The first type, Implicit Object, is non-referring, unspecific and highly predicative, while the verb denotes generic self-sufficient action. The predicative part emphasizes the action itself or the repetition of the action, instead of expressing accomplishments of the action (from bounded telic action to unbounded atelic action). Thus, the indefinite objects in this VO construction lose their prominence since they have become non-focal. Besides, the conceptual representation of the verb specifies the type of arguments occurring with the verb and accordingly puts selective restrictions on the argument which follows the verb.As for Empty Object, it is most constrained by structural factors to organize the information, such as those participants given by a contrastive or an imperative structure will be more likely to be omitted than those introduced for the first time. Empty Object, definite in nature and served as the given or known information, can be recovered from the adjacent context without ambiguity. Thus it acts as the ground since it has lost the position of focus and the feature of unpredictability. Besides, we believe it is the discourse structure that further constrains the prominence of objects. If the arguments retain their status of being focal, topical or new, they cannot be semantically weakened to be the cognitive"Ground", which bears low prominence. Conventional Object Omission, again much affected by semantic and pragmatic factors, form a metonymic triangle link among its three elements. From the conceptual aspects, omitted conventional objects and fake objects are cross-involved in their semantic meanings as patient arguments, while the latter are prominent as the Metonymy carrier.In fact, the VO construction we mentioned can provide the same meaning no matter the objects omitted or not, only being different in their semantic prominence (Figure and Ground in Psychology). But traced back to cognitive motivations, all categories of Null Object are used to fulfill the principle of economy of linguistic expression and cognitive processing.