Temporality And Its Operations In Language

This dissertation is a study on atemporalization and its effects on the use and evolution of linguistic structures.Temporality refers to the temporal qualities of the conceptualized event. It is a processual continuum that is imposed on the described situation by mental scannings. a mark of the conceptualizer's subjective cognitive processing that is left in language.The concept denoted by a lexical item is positioned somewhere on this continuum, demonstrating different degrees of temporality and atemporality. Each lexical item is a small whole, whose characteristics will emerge in accordance with the coercion of the constructions or contexts in which it appears, thus displaying temporality or atemporality. Languages differ in terms of whether the temporality of lexical items is obligatorily predetermined or morphologically marked. English lexical items, whose temporality is assigned in the lexicon, lie at either extremes of the continuum. It is characteristic of being mono-value:nouns denote atemporal things, while verbs temporal relations. Nouns, to be used as verbs, should be temporalized. Likewise, verbs to be used as nouns should undergo atemporaliztion. In contrast, lexical items in Mandarin Chinese are not marked temporal or atemporal in lexicon. They lie at the middle of the temporality continuum and are characteristic of being dual-value:they release temporality when used as verbs and atemporality when used as nouns, as determined by the interaction between these items and constructions. This lays a solid philosophical foundation for temporality in Generative Holism.Sequential and summary scannings serve as the psychological basis of temporality. A number of psychological experiments have proved the existence of these two modes of scanning. Furthermore, though nouns generally denote atemporal things and adjective atemporal qualities, they have potential of being construed as temporal. This affirms the existence of temporality from a linguistic point of view.Temporality is a continuum, which displays itself in different lexical categories, different members of the same categories, different syntactic positions, verbs of different intercal structures as well as different historical periods of the same category. This is in accordance with the continuums of designation-assertion, of transitivity, of desententialization, of backgrounding, and of grammaticalization.Temporal izaton and atemporalization are two opposite operations of the same entity, which occur simultaneously. We mainly focus on the latter in this dissertation, for it's more noticeably observed. Atemporalization can be identified from perspectives of semantics and syntax. When a verb denotes the result or state of another verb instead of being semantically oriented towards a thing, it has gone through atemporalization. Atemporalization can also be identified through Test of Syntactic Flexibility, Test of Prominence, Test of Duplication and Test of Insertion. Syntactic flexibility includes parallel deletion, object fronting and anaphora of zero object.Atemporalization may be triggered by conceptual overlap or the internal readjustment of linguistic structures. The shift, in the historical change of Mandarin Chinese, from double verbal locuses to single verbal locus, is a case in point. The grammaticalizations of Chinese prepositions, verb-complement constructions and aspectual markers all find cause in the atemporalization of one of the two locuses.Atemporalization figures in three functions:triggering the transference from assertion to designation, the grammaticalizaiton via subjectification, and backgrounding. At the level of clause, the transference from assertion to designation finds manifestation in desententialization. With the increase in desententialization, atemporalization rises proportionately.Clauses, like lexical items, can refer metonymically when used to designate, on the conditions that they have been atemporalized. The complementizer that is an atemporalizer, whose atemporalizing function shifts the complement clause from asserting to designating. This is the precondition of metonymical shift of complement proposition. Consequently, if the complement proposition should refer metonymically, as is required by the logical orientation of the main predicate, the complementizer that is not to be omitted.This study also finds that the essence of subjectification is the attenuation of subject control, which is reflected in the atemporalization of the relationship on the objective axis, and in the relationship on the subjective axis turning to be the profiled process by the clause. We have two kinds of subjectification. In the first case, the reference-point relationship that arises from the mental scanning of the conceptual izer gets more and more prominent, and eventually becomes the main process profiled by the clause. In the second case, the reference-point relationship on the subjective axis continues to be atemporalized. and eventually results in the grammaticalization of some grammatical constituents into grounding elements.Atemporalization can also cause the backgrounding of clauses. In Mandarin Chinese, which lacks inflectional changes and in which syntactic order figures prominently, backgrounding is realized mainly through obligatory zero subject, displacement of subjects and displacement of modifiers.This dissertation develops and systemizes the theory about temporality in cognitive grammar and finds its application in the study of Mandarin Chinese. It enlarges the scope of research of cognitive grammar and seeks support from new linguistic materials and typological evidences.