Modern Chinese Tool Areas Of Cognitive Research

This paper is a research about Chinese semantic categories system, in which the mainly discussing subject is instrumental category. The research of Chinese semantic categories system is a direct representation of a research method which means 'beginning with grammatical meaning research to explore grammar form ' . And this research with Chinese characteristics is also fitting the theories of functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics. This research not only explains Chinese fact and describes Chinese regulation more effectively, but also develops theory opinions and special ways of Chinese grammar research more widely. In conclusion, this paper has great value of theory and practice.The instrument category is an important category in Chinese semantic categories system. Although there are some discusses before, they emphasized on detail describe and not put the instrument category into a more wider theory system. Therefore those discusses are lack of integrality and explanation. Firstly, we try to sketch a Chinese semantic category system. And basing on that system, we study the cognitive character, semantic meaning and grammar representation of instrument category.In a word, the main achievements and innovations in this paper are as follows:(l)We have divided instrument category into natural instrument category and lingual instrument category. Then we created a new semantic analysis梞ulti-features analysis method by extracting advantages of semantic features theory and prototype category theory. Through this analysis method we described differential features, typical features and possible features of natural instrument category and lingual instrument category.(2)We have discovered that lingual instrument category should not be an independent category, but a kind of relation category. We established the concepts of 'event relation category' and 'item relation category' .(3)We have found the 'resort category' in 'item relation category' . So we regarded the instrument category, material category and means category as its subcategory. We depicted the differences among those three subcategories in detail, and detected that there are no clear limits among them. But from the history origin, semantic meaning and grammar function, we found that instrument category is the focus of resort category.(4)We have redefined the instrument verb through the different semantic limits, which regulated by verb semantic framework. Further more, we separated the instrument verb into special instrument verb, broadinstrument verb and multi-instrument verb.(5)According to the achievements of cognitive psychics research, we described cognitive characters of instrument category. We defined corresponding lingual behaves as 'clarity' and 'recursion' , so we made some new explanation for lingual behaves.(6)From the cognitive character of instrument, we researched the characters of body instruments, and also studied the representation after body instruments were put into the sentences. And we explained some lingual usages, which were never explained before. (7) We explained the reasons why instrument elements could appear as subjects, objects and objects of '把' , '被' . Basing on those explanations we concluded the standard and method to find Chinese semantic category.There are still many disadvantages in this paper, due to the time and my own limited ability. For instance, the usage of some special instruments are not discussed totally; the features of material category and means category are just mentioned but not discussed in details; even the localism materials and foreign lingual materials are not be used in the lingual material, etc. Therefore, a further study is to be needed in future.