A Study For Cognitive Semantics In Chinese Syntax

IntroductionBased on the theory of cognitive semantics, the paper focuses on the cognitive motivation of the meanings of some important syntactic constructions in Chinese language. Our research, on the basis of a mutual validation between language forms and meanings, will serve to further reveal the unique psychological reality of Chinese syntactic constructions. Our description and illustration of the psychological reality should meet the practical requirement of acquiring and teaching Chinese as a second language.Chapter 1 The Displacement Schema of the Ba-sentenceBased on an analysis of statistics of an authentic corpus, it is concluded in this chapter that what is emphasized in a typical Ba-sentence is the process of spatial displacement of an object under the action of an external force. Four variant forms, namely, relevant, equivalent, changing and resultative schemata, can be derived from the schema representing this process by means of metaphorical mapping.Chapter 2 The Sequential Framework of the Lian-sentence and the Projection of Conditional ConstituentThis chapter focuses on the syntactic and semantic issues of the Lian-sentence, which regards a covert sequence of quantity hierarchy as its cognitive motivation. We argue that, according to an Idealized Cognitive Model, people establish the correlativity among things and ascertain their hierarchy to arrange them sequentially. Syntactically, this process is manifested through the Lian-sentence. It can be realized by two means: activating the sequence of the ordered nouns and forming a sequence for the unordered. Like nouns which form a spatial sequence, verbs form a framework of temporal sequence. Thereby in the context the Lian-sentence functions as the conditional constituent, from the direct to the indirect. Thus a unified explanation can be given for various syntactic and semantic phenomena of the construction.Chapter 3 Distant Causality Motivation of the Verb Copying ConstructionThe verb copying construction, as a special verb-complement construction, falls into two semantic categories: deviation from the anticipated results, and largequantity of motion. The former one, the semantic category that the typical verb copying construction represents, is motivated by a distant causality, while the latter is consistent with the former through metonymy. We find the construction functions as the causal constituent in the context pragmatically, which is another proof of our conclusion.Chapter 4 The Unboudedness of Syntactic Reduplication in ChineseThe opposition of "bounded" and "unbounded" is the most basic cognitive mode of the category of "quantity", which is a remarkable feature of the three main reduplication forms of verbs, adjectives and quantifiers in Chinese. Based on an analysis of the examples from Contemporary Spoken Chinese Corpus, this chapter gives a new theoretical interpretation for the meaning of reduplication, from the point of view of "bounded" and "unbounded".We assert that the three forms are projections of three cognitive modes for "quantity" from the "unbounded" viewpoint. The reduplication of verbs, adjectives and quantifiers respectively based on habituality, non-comparativeness and one-dimensionality of time separately reflects "unbounded short quantity", "unbounded high quantity", and "unbounded individual quantity". The unboundedness feature of Chinese syntactic reduplication is due to people's cognitive mode. The grammatical meaning of the main reduplication forms in Chinese can now be explained cognitively in a unified way.Chapter 5 A Semantic Demotion Mechanism of the Basic Prepositions Derivation in ChineseBased on the analysis of the non-terminating verbs, this paper expounds one of the possibilities of the basic prepositions derivation in Chinese. It focuses on the description of the non-terminating features of the verbs which have derived into the basic prepositions, and points out that to meet the requirement of the full-form sentences, the non-terminating verbs r...