A Cognitive Approach To The Meaning Of English Motion Verbs

In the semantic linguistics,the study of meaning is the weakest part compared with the study of sound and vocabulary.Meanwhile,compared with the study of nouns and prepositions,the study of the meaning of English verbs is far from enough due to their semantic instability.The meaning of English motion verbs is strikingly instable in that it tends to be over sensitive to a linguistic context.In view of the traditional inadequacy,this thesis attempts to explore the meaning extension of English motion verbs within a theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics.The theoretical analysis in this thesis is connected with a case discussion,considering meanings as different concepts.The main ideas are as follows.First of all,the different methods in verb classification are reviewed with the aim to give the definition of the motion verb.In general,the concept of the motion verb is connected with the state verbs.From the cognitive views,the different meanings of a polysemy belong to different domains and the motion verbs should be involved in the motion in the spatial domain.Then,the meaning of a given English motion verb is likely to be a semantic prototype-category with schemas,in which members have an unequal status with one being more representative of the verb meaning.It becomes a prototypical sense as a core in the semantic category which can be conceptualized as a synthesis of "prototypical attributes" and "schema".With this semantic category,three cognitive mechanisms are manipulated for a core-boundary extension form the prototype.With a case study of pass,it is characterized a semantic prototype-category extension pertaining to English motion verbs.With the respect of the data collected from the dictionaries and the corpus,every meaning in the semantic category of pass is studied.First is to find out the prototype pass and its two attributes,i.e.CHANGE IN PLACE and LANDMARK.And then is to study every meaning of pass with the purpose to setting up its meaning network.Along with the meaning extension in the semantic category of pass,the Trajector-Landmark schema and metaphor are helpful to illustrate the connections of different meanings of pass in the spatial,temporal, state,amount event and emotional domains.Backed by prototype-category,image schema and Lakovian metaphor,the study in this thesis,exemplifies with a case study of pass that the meaning of an English motion verb can be described as a semantic prototype-category with schemas.In addition,it is concurrently justified that the meaning extension to English motion verbs by means of typical attributes and schemas.