A Contrastive Study On Perceptional Clauses In English And Chinese Under The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

Perception refers to the cognition and understanding of the outside world through people's sense organs.As an advanced physical and mental activity,it is an essential way for human to experience the material world.In the framework of grammatical metaphor in systemic functional linguistics,the thesis aims to make a contrastive study on the perceptional clauses in English and Chinese.The congruent forms of perceptional clauses should observe such criterions: Firstly,the primary participant is Senser that is animate and has the ability to sense;Secondly,the secondary participant is Phenomenon which is sensible.Accordingly,various types of metaphorical clauses have been identified.Then the thesis makes a contrastive analysis on the frequent metaphorical perceptional clauses in English and Chinese.Through the analysis,following conclusions are made:Firstly,both English and Chinese perceptional clauses converted from congruent forms to metaphorical ones go through the processes from seeing to knowing and further to experiencing,in which the agentivity of perception verbs are increasing.When the congruent forms and metaphorical ones are similar in forms,the process shifts usually occur in the projection within the mental process.When they are not similar in forms,the process shifts usually occur in the projection from perception process to material process.In the process of transitive analysis on perception clauses in English and Chinese,we find that their process shifts can both occur between the processes of main domains and between the sub-processes within one domain as well.Secondly,the perception verbs used in metaphorical forms are ones which express basic categories and general semantics,rather than ones which contain many semantic features of concert actions.For example,in seeing verbs in English,only see and witness can have metaphorical meanings rather than glare,glance,etc.We analyze that witness is related to see's features of prototypical perception.Witness has the basic semantic element [+see],while seeing verbs as glare,glance have the basic semantic element [+look],which express the action of looking and involving more details such as manners,attitudes,tense.These factors lead to their loss of the prototypical meaning of seeing.Lastly,in cognitive view,perceptional clauses have metaphorical meanings from visual perception domain into mental activity domain,social interaction domain,material world domain and other perceptional domains such as hearing.See and hear are remote perception verbs,which project more metaphorical meanings in mental domain,while smell,taste and feel are close perception verbs,which project more metaphorical meanings to mental emotion domain.Seeing verbs have the most metaphorical meanings and the information through this way is the most reliable and objective.Hear is slightly passive compared with see.Smell,taste and feel are more subjective and limited,but involving more embodied emotions.Meanwhile,we find that the semantic connotations in Chinese perceptional verbs are richer than those in English due to the properties of disyllabic even polysyllabic words in Chinese characters.