Grammatical Metonymy Approach To English Imperative Construction With Stative Predicate Expressed By Adjective

As one of the basic cognitive instruments,metonymy actually can be instantiated in almost all levels of language:lexis,syntax,grammar,discourse and among others.Grammatical metonymy,being the reflection of conceptual metonymy at grammar level,is the research of conceptual metonymy taking sentence as the research unit.The imperative construction is a pervasive action construction that prototypically requires an action predicate in its syntactic structure.Nonetheless,the imperative construction with stative predicate,in daily communication,is not only feasible but also of highly frequent use.Although the studies of imperative construction with stative predicate enjoy a long-standing history,the existing researches mainly focus on its syntax and semantics.The cognitive motivations and metonymic operating mechanism of the imperative construction with stative predicate still need to be further investigated.Based on Panther&Thornburg’s view on grammatical metonymy,the present thesis,with a mixed methodology of qualitative and contrastive research,strives to explore the meaning representation,cognitive mechanism and pragmatic functions of English imperative construction with stative predicate,to be more specific,the imperative sentence expressed by adjective.The research findings are as follows:(1)the cognitive motivation of imperative construction with stative predicate expressed by adjective is metonymy in nature;(2)in the construction,the conflicts between non-actional lexical meaning and dynamic constructional meaning are resolved through three metonymic operating models,namely,one metonymy operating model,metonymic chain operating model and complicated metonymy operating model based on metaphor or context;(3)there exists a two-way relation between the metonymic motivation and the linguistic structure.On the one hand,the conflicts between lexical meaning and constructional meaning are resolved through metonymic operation.On the other hand,to sanction the metonymic mappings,imperatives with stative predicates expressed by adjectives should conform to Copula+Adjective structure and the adjectives are expected to fulfill the semantic features of Adj.[+Human],Adj.[+Controllable]and Adj.[+Positive];(4)the metonymic configuration endows the seemingly "abnormal" imperative construction expressed by adjective with special pragmatic functions,that is,linguistic simplicity,mitigation,and ostension.In brief,the present thesis not only expands the rationale of imperative construction with stative predicate,but also enriches the research categories and testifies the strong explanatory power of grammatical metonymy.Moreover,it is conducive to ameliorating the English grammar pedagogy,and instructive to English-Chinese translation involving imperatives.