On The Cognitive Construal Of English Absolute Clauses

This thesis adopts Langacker's cognitive grammar approach and discusses the cognitive construal of English absolute clauses. It is true that studies on English absolute clauses have been traditionally concerned with the syntactic issues, semantic roles, underlying motivations and grammaticalization, but no study addresses the motivation for absolute clauses supplanting finite adverbial clauses in discourse so as to avoid the blurring between matrix and adverbial clauses, and between co-and sub-ordination in terms of the heft and importance of syntactic entity and semantic content.In illustrating the cognitive construal of absolute clauses, the thesis develops Langacker's theory of cognitive construal and divides the concept of cognitive construal into two facets, the internal cognitive construal and the external cognitive construal, which might be overlapping to some extent, but lay different emphases on different aspects of the resulting syntactic structure.Observed within the developed theoretical framework of cognitive construal, absolute clauses redemonstrate in finer detail their syntactic features, semantic roles, grammaticalization and some of the motivating factors for being substituted for finite adverbial clauses, which have been examined by researchers, and are for the first time revealing about another factor of the motivation for the using of them-to lessen or even dismiss the possibility of the tenuous distinction between matrix and adverbial clauses, and thus between co-and sub-ordination. The findings concerning the cognitive construal of English absolute clauses presented in the thesis clearly point to the basic tenet of cognitive grammar that the syntax of an expression reflects its conceptual organization, and represents specific dimensions of its cognitive construal. The observation and findings also afford insights into essence of absolute clauses for language users, thereby facilitating and regulating the production and comprehension of this kind of clauses.