Cognitive Studies Of The Visual Verb Syntax In English

Grammaticalization has been defined as the process for full language items to expand their grammatical meaning and grammatical function which are always symbolized in the form of systematic changes at different levels as pronunciation, semantics, syntax and so on. The former grammaticalization research were mainly performed to describe the semantic and the syntax changes form the perspective of structural linguistics. Since the 1970s, the appearance of pragmatics and cognition linguistics has caused the grammaticalization research to turn to the induction and explanation of the language evolution rules and their mechanism. According to the grammar research tendency and the orientation, the current research attempts to construct the event cognition pattern for verb research through which the comparative analysis of Chinese vision verb "kan", "jian" and English vision verb "look", "see" can be performed from the perspectives of image scheme, semantic structure and syntax structure to explore the general characteristics, cognition principles and cognition mechanisms of the grammaticalization to construct new patterns and frames for grammarticalization analysis.The research has discovered that Chinese vision verbs "kan", "jian" and English vision verbs "look", "see" share high similarities of the semantic characteristic and the semantic distribution and Chinese vision verbs have gone futher than English version verbs in the process of grammaticalization but they have the same cognition routes and the cognition mechanism actually.The phenomenon that Chinese vision verbs are entailed more extensive semantic and function distribution than those of English vision verbs indicates that Chinese vision verbs have gone further in the grammaticalization process. The meaning of the Chinese vision verb "kan" can be realized in the form of " visual behavior", "understanding and modality", as well as "inference of causes and effect" and also the function changes from "behavior verbs" to "discourse marker" and "conjunction word". But English vision verb "look" only be used in the expression of " visual behavior" and "understanding and modality" and also the function changes from "behavior verbs" to "discourse marker". At the same time, the semantic of the...