A Study Of The Directional Structures In Modern Vietnamese From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Directional structures in modern Vietnamese,which can represent motion events and developmental process,are varied in meaning with high frequency of usage.From the cognitive perspective,in order to investigate the underlying cognition features of directions of the Vietnamese people,the dissertation tries to describe and explain Vietnamese directional structures from the following three aspects: cognitive meanings of directional verbs(DVs),syntactic semantics of verb-directional constructs and collocation motivations of verb-directional constructions.Vietnamese directional words(DWs)usually include the following 11 words: lên,(?),ra,sang,qua,(?).The writer builds a corpus of modern Vietnamese in this dissertation,and then searches for the tokens of the 11 DWs therein.DWs can be used as main verbs,which are called directional verbs.The writer has found that Vietnamese DVs are very different in frequency of use,in which ?i appears with the highest frequency and (?) appears with the lowest frequency.By analyzing the actual usages of DVs and summarizing their meanings,the writer has found that their typical and non-typical meanings form a prototype meaning category with the literal meaning at the core.Different meanings are related by cognitive mechanisms such as image schema,conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy,forming a radial semantic network with different degrees of complexity.Differences in basic meanings and subsequent semantic extensions provide explanations for the imbalanced distribution of DVs.Having described and explained the semantics of DVs systematically,the writer concludes that the cognition of directions of the Vietnamese people is of embodiment and selectivity.Moreover,the writer also formulates a cognitive schema of directions of the Vietnamese nationality,which consists of geographical,social,psychological and metaphorical components.The 11 DVs in Vietnamese can be placed after main verbs,forming verb-directional constructs.The distribution of Vietnamese directional constructs is also imbalanced,in which "V+ra" appears with the highest frequency and "V+sang" appears with the lowest frequency.Vietnamese verb-directional constructs have syntactic semantics that are distinct from lexical semantics of the DWs.Adopting the "usage-based" model,the dissertation tries to extract the syntactic semantics of verb-directional constructs from the language facts,and concludes that verb-directional constructs have three types of meaning: motional meaning,resultative meaning and state meaning.Meanwhile,verb-directional constructs are also polysemous.Different meanings of the same verb-directional constructs form a prototype meaning category,with the literal or basic meaning at its core.According to the macro-event theory,the dissertation considers that verb-directional constructs can represent motion events,change of state events,realization events and temporal contouring events.The main verbs licensed in verb-directional constructs fall into four types: behavioral verbs,action verbs,psychological verbs,and state verbs according to their spatial,procedural,and autonomic characteristics.The verbs permitted in verb-directional constructs may vary with different semantic types of verb-directional constructs.As a form-meaning pair,the Vietnamese verb-directional construct features with the characteristics of construction such as abstraction,generalization and integration.Moreover,Vietnamese verb-directional constructions are usually polysemous: they not only represent motion events,but also express the processes of development and change.By using the theory of construction grammar,the dissertation tries to analyze the collocation mechanisms of Vietnamese verb-directional constructions from spatiality,temporality and transitivity of main verbs and DWs in verb-directional constructions.Related findings on the collocation of DWs and main verbs are as follows:(1)the spatiality of DWs and main verbs may not necessarily be consistent;the spatiality of the whole directional constructions mainly depends on DWs;(2)the licensed main verbs in verb-directional constructions usually comply with the DWs in temporality,and the spatiality of verb-directional constructions depends on that of DWs;(3)after the directional constituents are licensed into verb-directional constructions,the transitivity of the whole construction is strengthened.Therefore,it can be observed that the syntactic-semantics features of the verb-directional constructions are mainly represented by the DWs.