Prototypical Effects Of English Syntactic Constructions And Their Cognitive Motivations

This thesis is intended to carry on the research on the prototype effects of English syntactic constructions and try to explore their cognitive motivations. It aims to generalize and classify the characteristics of syntactic constructions by means of prototype theory. Prototype theory has derived from philosophy and psychology and has an enormous impact on many academic disciplines: psychology linguistics, anthropology, philosophy and computer science. It is a new way of looking at category in cognitive linguistics. Since the book Linguistics Categorization: Prototype in Linguistic Theory was first published in 1989, prototype categorization has received a fair amount of attention in the linguistics circle. In the last fifteen years, the concept of prototype has become one of the most popular concepts in lexical semantics. So the thesis attempts to adopt prototype theory to analyze some phenomena of English syntactic constructions. The main characteristics of a prototype category are prototypicality, family resemblance and fuzziness. These characteristics motivate the features of syntactic constructions: gradience, relevance and extension. These findings help us to deeply understand the nature of language, guiding the further research. The expected achievements are hopefully going to benefit our language learning and teaching, enriching the expatiation of cognitive categorization.The whole thesis is divided into six parts: Chapter one explains the purpose of this thesis and gives a brief introduction to the four basic approaches to syntax study. Chapter two presents a retrospect of the related literature research. Chapter three introduces the first characteristic of syntactic constructions: gradience. It is analyzed from three aspects: word categories (noun, verb, adjective, etc), possessive genitive and sentence structure which are motivated by salience and attention. Chapter four deals with the second characteristic: relevance, which is motivated by meaning chain and family resemblance. Chapter five analyzes the last characteristic: extension, which is motivated by metaphor and culture model. Chapter Six is the conclusion.