A Cognitive Grammar Account Of English Cognate Object Constructions

English Cognate Object Construction(COC)is a special language phenomenon.In the COC,the verbs are intransitive verbs,while these verbs can take arguments.That is to say,the object is morphologically or semantically connected with the verb itself in a cognate way.For example,Mary laughed a sad laugh.The COC has attracted much attention from scholars at home and abroad.They have conducted a comprehensive analysis on the features of the COC from multiple perspectives,such as the syntactic features and the semantic features.However,few scholars make an attempt to explore the generative mechanism of the COC.Therefore,this thesis tries to analyze how the COC generates.Based on the analysis of the previous studies,the author classifies it into four perspectives: traditional grammar study,transformational-generative grammar study,functional grammar study,as well as cognitive linguistics study.With respect to this thesis,it is mainly on the basis of Langacker?s study,and then proposes two new cognitive models so as to make a batter explanation of the generative mechanism of the COC.During the process of conceptualization,different construals could be caused with respect to one language phenomenon.As for the COC,the CO has two construals.One is construed as a consequence of the corresponding verb.The other is regarded as a type of the related verb itself.The profiled adjectives in the COC express totally different conceptual meanings with the adverbials in the SVA(Subject-Verb Adverbial)construction.The former undergoes a process of reification,and as a result,an abstract conceptual region is formed.The latter still remain its processual construal.On the basis of the analysis above,this thesis also makes a comparison between the COC and the Monotransitive Construction.It is discovered that the COC is affected by the Monotransitive Construction.Consequently,there is a causal relationship between the verbs and the COs in the COC.The Monotransitive Construction categorizes the intransitive verbs in the COC,and therefore,these verbs get the extra “cause-existence” meaning and hold the ability to get extra argument.In this way the generative mechanism of the COC is solved.Recently,with the wide usage of the COC,the meaning of the verbs in the COC may be changed gradually,which both include their original meaning and also get the new “cause-existence” meaning.This thesis gets some achievements on the analysis of the generative mechanism of the COC.However,it still has many shortcomings.Therefore,in the chapter some limitations are pointed out and some implications are come up with in order to contribute to the development of the future study.