Cognitive Motivations Of Unidirectionality In Grammaticalization: On Conceptual Metaphors, Propositional Schemas And Event-frames

Unidirectionality is a basic and crucial feature of grammaticalization. Up till the present moment, researchers have seldom taken this issue into consideration from the cognitive perspective, although majority of them are supporting its effectiveness. The novel idea of this thesis lies in the explanation of three vital cognitive motivations of unidirectionality and their correlative ties with some characteristics of grammaticalization, by means of both diachronic theoretical deduction and synchronic word analyses. These are: conceptual metaphors versus unidirectional mappings, propositional schemas versus grammatical paths, and event-frames versus loss.Conceptual metaphors can explain a series of metaphorical phenomena through the principles of mapping from source domains to target ones. According to Ahrens (2002)'CM Model, mappings of human's metaphorical concepts will project a trail from concrete and simple categories to abstract and complex ones, coinciding with the way of language evolution from less grammatical to more grammatical status. Propositional schemas lay emphasis on the changes from basic schemas to derived ones."Path"is the intrinsic representation of grammaticalization. Both of them are concerned with the variation from older to newer forms and the transfer from fundamental to evolutionary images. Event-frame is a prototype in the frame and attention approach. It has a close connection with"loss", which refers to the fact that words or morphemes may lose their original meanings or function in pace with the processes of grammaticalization and sometimes may be completely omitted even. In other words, more grammatical items will present much further lexical or syntactic changes than less grammatical ones, accompanied by the corresponding conceptual development from motion to causation and finally to interrelationship event-frames.In brief, all of these motivations will take their explanatory powers into effect in grammaticalization studies, because they are dominated by the progress of human's cognitive capacities, i.e."PERSON > OBJECT > SPACE > TIME > PROCESS > QUALITY". Obviously, it is also a unidirectional pathway in nature.