Analyzing Clause Of Complex Sentences From The Perspective Of Grounding Theory

Cognitive Grammar,as a complete new perspective of language research founded by Ronald W.Langacker in the late 20^thcentury,is different from the traditional grammar,Noam Chomsky’s TG grammar,M.A.K.Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and so on.Since 21th century,more and more scholars have followed Langacker’s paces,trying to explain all the grammatical phenomena from the perspective of human beings’mental conceptions,and then Grounding Theory came out and has become a well-found theory gradually.Grounding Theory explains how the things or processes are associated with cognitive situation by grounded nominal and grounded clause,and how to use the grammar marks to build a mental connection between the thing or process and speech participants.At present,most of the scholars in academic or teaching area intend to use traditional grammar to explain complex sentences.Although some other grammatical theories have proposed their opinion on this issue,all these interpretations have their limitations.At the same time,Grounding theory in Cognitive Grammar stays in its initial phase of application,and it describes only how to ground the noun and the clause.Therefore,Based on the grounding theory,this study tries to analyze English complex sentences with the help of Stanfordcore NLP 4.2.0 tools,and explore the grounding elements and grounding mechanism.The corpus used in this study comes from Advances with English（modules 1-11）,and The New English Grammar edited by Zhang Zhenbang.The major findings are as follows:First of all,the research enriches the grounding theory of complex sentences,which describes and construes how the grounded trajector and landmark are composed by subordinator grounding elements to profile the complicated events in the cognitive ground.The grounding element is a grammaticalized and schematized category,which connects the thing or speech event referred to by the noun phrase or the clause with the cognitive scene.The noun enters the cognitive scene through the demonstrative pronoun,article and grounding quantifier,and the verb enters the cognitive scene through the present tense,past tense and modal verb,and outlines the thing or speech event referred to by the noun phrase or the clause Highlight the position in the cognitive scene.The grounding elements can be classified into definite and quantitative according to their grammatical attributes.For noun phrases,there are definite grounding elements including definite article the and demonstrative pronouns（this/that,these/those）,quantitative grounding elements including indefinite article（a/an）,zero form,grounding quantifiers（most,all,some,every,no,each,any）;For the formulaic clause,the definite grounding elements include the present tense and the past tense,and the quantitative grounding elements include the modal verbs of the short-range basic form and the long-range variant.The former includes may,can,will,shall and must,while the latter includes might,could,would and should.In this study,subordinate conjunctions in complex sentences are classified as grounding elements.Secondly,this study explores the grounding mechanism of complex sentences.In cognitive ground,the grounded trjectors and landmarks in asymmetry are composed and prominent onstage by subordinator grounding elements,while the subordinator grounding elements offstage are in the relationship substrate between them.And the landmark is overriden from strong to weak by the trajector through the subordinator grounding elements,and its relative independence becomes from weak to strong as an embed constituent,a restrictive one,an extra non-restrictive one or a relative independent modifying one.And in the speech action domain,the speech participators offstage interact and consult each other with subordinator grounding elements directing their attention to the grounded trajector and landmark.