Cognitive-Grammatical Analysis Of English Exstential There-be Construction

With the development of Cognitive Linguistics and other sciences, theknowledge and understanding about human cognitive abilities have improved greatly.The cognitive analysis of English Existential Sentences, especially There-beconstruction, has been a hot issue. As a common but special linguistic phenomenon,There-be construction has attracted more and more attention.English existential sentences, especially There-be construction, is conceived of aubiquitous phenomenon occurring in almost all the world languages (Frezz,1992).However, mainly owing to its perplexing grammatical and contextual features, forexample, the definiteness of NP, the unaccusitive of the verb and so forth, it’s beentaken as one of the brain-racking issues, confusing the linguistic researchers. Whatmakes it more complicated are its various representative forms in There-beconstruction. Historically, there are three main approaches having made contributionsto the study of this issue, which are descriptive, generative and functional approaches.But it’s unfortunate that these methods could not fully explain this linguisticphenomenon and manage to reach somewhat feasible results because of their owninherent inadequacies.This thesis attempts to explore There-be construction in English ExistentialSentences by means of Cognitive Grammatical theories, such as iconic principles,cognitive grammaticalization and some other principles. The goals of the research aremainly to understand the generation of There-be construction in English ExistentialSentences, to find the invisible Cognitive motivations of the development andexpansion of it for its specificity and particularity.Moreover, the discussions and researches of this thesis will mainly be focused onthe following two questions:(1) What are the distributive characteristics of iconic forming principles reflectedon the basic linguistic structures of There-be construction?(2) How do these forming principles embodied in There-be construction AndHow to contribute to the realization of the Working or Cognitive Mechanisms frombasic constructions to the variant structures?Through the discussion and analysis, several conclusions could be made asfollows: (1) Iconic principles and grammaticalization are of mental process ingrammatical constructions both of natural languages and of There-be constructionitself. They produce the fully understanding of the forming, generation anddevelopment of There-be construction. According to the cognitive-grammaticaltheories, There-be construction is not feature-based grammatical structures butcognitive grammar-oriented structures.(2) There-be construction has various types in both English and Chinese.Speaking generally, these types consist of three major classification: two basicstructures and one non-basic structures or one variant structures, which are mostproductive and generative. Cognitive iconicity and grammaticalization are theuniversal modes of thought and language, providing cognitive motivations andmechanisms behind the There-be construction. It’s exactly true that most of thesetypes of There-be constructions are founded on the iconic forming principles andcognitive grammatialization.Making some further studies on There-be construction is worthy and meaningful.Not only can it make us find out the linguistic features displayed by this kind ofspecial language phenomenon, but also prompt and improve our cognitive capabilitiesabout language and interaction.The Cognitive-grammatical theory provides a new perspective for studying theexistential There-be construction and the significances of this thesis can besummarized in the following:(1) It’s meaningful to facilitate the realization of improving the cognitivelinguistic capabilities to understand There-be construction profoundly and efficiently.(2) It’s contributable to help furnish some valuable suggestions to the researches,discussions and studies on There-be construction to improve the general perception ofit.(3) It’s helpful to broaden the studying range or width of There-be constructionthrough the combination of Cognitive-grammatical theories and practical linguisticdata for the lack of the former researches on it.