A Cognitive Approach To English Locative-predicate Construction

English Locative-Predicate Construction(EPLC)reflects the way people conceptualize the caused motion event,expresses the relative static state of the event,and emphasizes the achievement of goals.EPLC has the structure of NP1+VL+NP2,in which NP1 functions as the agent,NP2 as the patient(also the figure of motion),and VL as the predicate.In addition,VL originates from parent nouns which have a locative meaning.Such a verb still retains the locative meaning of the parent noun in addition to its caused motion meaning.Previous studies on EPLC mainly describe the noun origin of the construction predicate verbs and the internal mechanism of denominal verbs,which reflects a “verb-centered” mode.Such a mode focuses on word class conversion,but pays little attention to the role of the grammatical construction.In sharp contrast,cognitive linguistics regards construction as the basic component of grammatical representation(Langacker 1987,2008),and holds that the grammatical function and syntactic distribution of words are partly determined by their grammatical construction.Accordingly,it is more plausible to investigate locative verbs from a constructional perspective.With this in mind,we will try to probe into the semantic characteristics and cognitive motivations of EPLC from the perspective of construction.Due to the fact that both EPLC and its predicate reflect the changes between categories,this study proposes a Recategorization Realization Mode(RRM),which has the following characterisctics.First,the recategorization process involves a unidirectional development process from the original category to the new category.Second,recategorization can involve such different levels of language as phonetics,semantics,grammar and discourse.Thirdly,the recategorization of the original category into the new category is stimulated by cognitive mechanisms and regulated by context.Fourth,the cognitive mechanisms include cognitive construal,conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor.Finally,context may be linguistic,situational and cultural.Therefore,this dissertation will try to answer the following three research questions with RRM as the guidance.(1)What are the formal features of EPLC? What is the internal relationship between EPLC and the caused motion construction since both can encode realistic caused motion events? What is the relationship between EPLC and the single object construction? And how many types may EPLC have?(2)What are the semantic features of the components of EPLC? What is the cognitive basis of the noun source of the predicate verb in EPLC? And what are the semantic features of EPLC as a whole?(3)What motivates the emergence of EPLC?In view of the above research questions,this research adopts a qualitative method and logical reasoning to investigate the idiosyncratic syntactic and semantic properties of EPLC on the basis of authentic data.The data used in this dissertation are from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)and British National Corpus(BNC).The main findings of this dissertation are as follows:First,based on prototype category theory,schema categorization theory and dynamic categorization theory,RRM is proposed.According to this mode,recategorization extends the research scope from the internal changes of language categories to the changes between language categories.And the interaction between linguistic categories and the dynamic change mechanisms behind them are thus revealed.Secondly,EPLC has a close relation to the caused motion construction and the single object construction.EPLC is the formal representation of Caused Motion Event with Fused-Force-Location.This event results from the recategorization of Caused Motion Event with Overt Location,which can be represented in English as the caused motion construction.At the same time,EPLC is the extension of the single object construction category and EPLC can be regarded as a subclass of the single object construction.According to different spatial dimensions of the location,EPLC can be divided into two-dimentional EPLC and three-dimentional EPLC,both of which can be subdivided into concrete EPLC and abstract EPLC.Thirdly,the subject of EPLC has four semantic features,namely,causativity,empathy hierarchy,definiteness and Trajector/Landmark organization.The predicate of EPLC is the locative verb,which is relevant with both the noun category and the verb category.The conversion from the original category of “parent noun” to the new category of “locative verb” reflects the recategorizing process.The semantic features of EPLC's predicate are causativity,mobility,spatiality and boundedness.The semantic features of EPLC's object include controllability,willingness,mobility,definiteness,Trajector/Landmark organization,supportability/containment and boundedness.Fourth,EPLC results from the recategorization from Caused Motion Event with Overt Location to Caused Motion Event with Fused-Force-Location.The realization of the recategorizing process requires the promotion of cognitive mechanisms and the regulation of context.The cognitive mechanisms include cognitive construal,conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor.The motivation of cognitive construal involves the adjustment of specificity,the change of mental scanning path and the shift of prominence.The conceptualizer will adjust the specificity from the high to the low.The mental scanning path will be changed from “agent-patient-location” to “agent-location-patient”.The focal prominence will be shifted from “subject,object and location” to “subject and object”.The promotion of conceptual metonymy involves encoding complex real events in simple linguistic form and expressing complex meaning in simple form.The motivation of conceptual metaphor is reflected in the mapping of EPLC from concrete spatial domain to abstract psychological,social and emotional domains.The regulation of context is reflected in the extension of the prototypical single object construction and the influence of situational context on the interpretation of event and construction.All in all,based on the categorization theory,the RRM proposed in this dissertation opens to some extent a new vision of categorization research,expands the application scope of categorization theory and enhances the explanatory power and applicability of categorization theory.Furthermore,the findings of this dissertation deepen the understanding of EPLC,and may help to explain relevant constructions in other languages.