| The premise for people to understand and transform the world is to be able to perceive the existence of things,so the cognitive achievements about the existence of things naturally become one of the important semantic contents of verbal communication.How these cognitive experiences are realized into specific discourse forms and used in expression is one of the important contents of language research,which is also the core issue of this paper.The dissertation consists of six chapters,and the main contents are as follows:The first chapter is introduction,which mainly clarifies the research object,research idea,theoretical basis and research method of the paper,which establishes the foundation for the follow-up research.This paper aims to explain "how people use language to express the meaning of existence",and tries to adopt the research route from meaning to form,starting from the cognitive basis and semantic structure of human beings,to construct the existential semantics category and to search its linguistic expressions,to clarify its discourse forms and generalize the generating mechanisms of the counterpart.The second chapter reviews the research about the semantic category of existential events.In reviewing the previous research,we find that the existential meaning is mainly studied in the existential sentence.Because the existential sentences are based on the specific formal characteristics,so the investigation of existential meaning is limited,which mainly focuses on the language forms,and thus excludes other forms which express existential meaning.It is possible to start from a new perspective—semantic category.We first exclusively search the possible language forms which express existential meaning,and then discuss how the existential meaning is mapped onto the language linear sequence,so as to find a systematic explanation for the expression of existential meaning.In the third chapter,we try to get rid of the limitation of structural form,and regard existence as a static event in the continuous process of "emergence—existence—disappearance",and construct the semantic category of existential events.This category reflects people's cognition of the attachment relationship between things and specific spaces,and it includes four elements:existential subject,existential space,existential time and existential way.The necessary elements of the category are existential subject and the existential space,the attachment between which could activate people's knowledge of existence.The selective elements are existential time and existential way,which are attached to the former attachment relationship between existential subject and the existential space,and participate in the construction of the existential category.Existential semantic category is an archetypal category with typical members as its core,and it has the characteristics of stability,continuity and adhesiveness.It reflects people's cognitive schema about existence,and restricts the selection of related expression forms on the other hand.The 4th Chapter expounds the core theory of the thesis and distinguishes the linguistic form and discourse form of existential semantic category.In essence,linguistic form refers to the reference of language structure and is a linguistic form that can represent the whole existence event.And verb is the linguistic unit that can represent the existential event.Discourse form is a series of symbols generated by language,which comes into being when language forms are used to refer to the objects in the real world.The typical member discourse form for existential category is existential sentence,and other types of discourse forms could also express existential category.Verbs are classified in to different categories based on the various ways in representing existence events: The one which exclusively represents existential events is the general representational form of existential events;and the one which represents the whole existential event as well as other elements such as the way,space,time or subject of the event,is the special representational form of existential events;In addition,these constituent elements of existential semantic categories also have their representational forms.Like the representational form of existential semantic categories,they are "preparatory units" in expressing existential events,waiting for the disposal.The fifth chapter discusses the possible sequence of linguage symbols when semantic categories are mapped onto discourse.These fragments cut out from utterance are a series of symbols which are composed of language to express the category of existence.Existential subject and existential space,as the necessary elements of existential event,are bound to obtain formal representation.With the reference of the two,the expression forms can be divided into "space antecedent" sequence and "subject antecedent? sequence.These expressions do not correspond to specific syntactic structures,which could be the existential sentences or subject-predicate structures and so on.Among these structures,an attribute phrase can also reflect people's cognitive mode and expression rules about the relationship between things and space,and thus is also the reflection of the existential category at the level of discourse.This paper classifies the attribute phrase,taking the semantic type of the head word as the standard.Because its structural form is different from other categories,we classify it as " attribute phrase " for separate discussion.Chapter six discusses the mechanism or rule of discourse formation of existential category.In communication,the speaker will choose from the set of expression forms of events according to his/her communicative intention and judgment of cognitive context,which also means to refer to specific existential events.The level of events abstraction,the difference of cognitive accessibility,highlight method and the requirements for discourse construction are the important factors influencing the speakers' choice.In the cognitive operation process – "observation-activation-choiceimplementation",the speaker will compare and select the core principles as a basis for the symbol encoding,which is exactly the conditions of referring existential events.In the epilogue,we summarize the main conclusions,analyze the deficiencies in the research,and put forward further research ideas. |
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