The Working Mode And Cognitive Mechanism Of Verb Argument Enrichment

It has been found that the argument structure of verbs may change in actuallanguage use. The number of the arguments of a verb may increase in the meantime.We term this phenomenon as “verb argument enrichment". As it’s getting morefrequent, many researchers have carried out investigation and sought for soundexplanations for this phenomenon. Though concerns are shown to such irregularlanguage facts in previous studies, no systematic or profound explanation and analysisof the working mode and cognitive mechanism of verb argument enrichment are given,this leaves us some space to talk about it from a new perspective.The thesis mainly focuses on the verb argument enrichment. Generally speaking,there are three types of verb argument enrichment: one is “V_t+NP₁+NP₂”constarction，one is “V_i+NP" construction and the third type is the “V_i+NP₁+NP₂" construction.Such usages were regarded as ungrammatical by many scholars in the past but it’sgetting more popular nowadays. Various approaches towards this phenomenon arebeing taken, for instance, the syntax, pragmatics and semantics perspective. However,neither approach can give a satisfactory explanation upon the above-mentionedquestions, thus, this thesis is trying to answer these questions from the perspective ofcognitive linguistics.Construction grammar is adopted in this thesis to shed light upon the workingmode of verb argument enrichment. The enriched arguments of the verb originate fromits independent constructional meanings which are not altered with the alternation oflinguistic units licensed to them. When verb enters into some construction, the verbinteracts with the construction, and then the construction imposes its independentconstructional meaning on the verb, which brings out verb argument enrichment.Then，through the in-depth analysis of the linguistic data, it can be seen that thecognitive mechanism of verb argument enrichment is the metaphorical mapping andmetaphorical extension. Metaphor pervasively exists in people’s everyday life andcognition and plays an important role in constructing people’s conceptual systemwhich has been agreed on by most scholars in the relevant fields.This thesis tries to give answers to the unsolved problems concerning the verbargument enrichment. Constructional meaning is the origin of verb argumentenrichment. Profiling and frequency of language use is the motivation of verbargument enrichment and metaphorical mapping is the cognitive mechanism of it.