A Study Of Cognitive Mechanisms In English Ambiguous Sentences Based On Discreteness

Ambiguity has always been a hot topic in linguistics. Researchers from different linguistic schools have also made many extensive studies into English ambiguity with their own approaches and focuses. The structural linguists employ Immediate Analysis (or IC Analysis) to describe English ambiguous sentences. This kind of analytical approach takes notice of the hierarchy feature of linguistic structures and may be employed to describe some ambiguous sentences resulting from the linear relationship. But it has no way to deal with ambiguity caused by discontinuous structures. What's worse, all these analyses are based on the language user's experience and knowledge. While the generative linguists make analyses about ambiguous sentences by the way of transformational rules, trying to find out the roots of ambiguity from the deep structures. Furthermore they find that movement, explicit or implicit, is also an important cause of ambiguity. The transformational rules and movement will make it possible to describe some ambiguous sentences which can not be dealt with in IC analysis. However, due to the limitation of their main frameworks, the above two approaches simply focus on the description of linguistic structures, neglecting the prescription of them. Meanwhile, they also take no consideration about the relationship between language and mind. Functional linguists, represented by Holliday, point out that ambiguity results from grammatical metaphors, so it is a relative, dynamic process. They approach ambiguity from the perspective of contexts and culture and also attach some importance to human's cognition in the development of language. But this approach still has no way to reveal the mental processes in the comprehension of ambiguous sentences due to little consideration of human's cognitive abilities and the interaction between language and mind. Thus in this thesis, they will be labeled as the traditional approach, which will be opposed to the cognitive approach. Greatly different from the traditional linguistics, cognitive linguistics emphasizes the embodied and interactive aspects of meaning. As a pivotal representative in cognitive linguistics, Langacker further equates meaning with conceptualization and puts forward the"encyclopedic"view in semantics. Thus his views lay great emphasis on the dynamic, humanistic, subjective and construing properties of meaning, realizing a great leap from the traditional view to the cognitive view of meaning. Furthermore, Langacker argues that the same situation may be expressed or interpreted distinctly from different cognitive perspectives, and all the analyses in cognitive linguistics should be based on the specific usage. Thus in cognitive approach, the analyses of ambiguous sentences should reflect changes of cognitive perspectives in the process of interpretation or construal. And in this thesis, the author will also define the ambiguous sentences as that in communication, a given linguistic expression will be interpreted distinctly by the same conceptualizer from distinct cognitive perspectives. The notions of discreteness and continuity are initially used in mathematics, and then extended to the study of linguistics. By making careful analyses about different definitions of discreteness, this thesis will finally adopt Langacker's views as part of the main theoretical sources. Langacker considers these two conceptions as different approaches to observe and embody the outside world. As one of the diverse cognitive perspectives, discreteness has attracted continuous attention from Langacker, who doesn't treat the issue of discreteness vs. continuity as a matter of dichotomy. Instead, he tries to find some coexistence between them in linguistic expressions, especially in semantics. On one hand, he confirms the discrete feature of language. On the other hand, he also regards continuity as an efficient tool to deal with a multiplicity of interrelating discrete factors and advances a continuous outlook to approach meaning. Different levels of discreteness and continuity reflect human's various cognitive perspectives about the same situation. Continuous parameters, such as backgrounds, specificity, ICMs, cognitive domains, prototypical categories, will help people to point out the intermediate point between two semantic values and that intermediate point will be the prototypically semantic value. Meanwhile Langacker also emphasizes the significance of compositional path and levels of activation in meaning. Different compositional paths of the same linguistic expression will show changes in the distributions or shades of discreteness between the linguistic elements, thus leading to alternative interpretations. By consulting all the relative literatures, the author of this thesis finds that there are few academic studies about discreteness in linguistics in China, not to mention the specific analyses about linguistic phenomena based on discreteness. Therefore, under the guidance of CG, this thesis will be based on discreteness to make some analyses about English ambiguous sentences and try to reveal the dynamic usage-based cognitive process and mechanisms.This thesis consists of four parts, with an introduction and a conclusion before and after the main parts respectively. Introduction will give the motivation, significance, theoretical sources and structures of the thesis. Then Chapter One will introduce a variety of definitions about discreteness, and different views toward the relationship between discreteness and continuity. Meanwhile some comparisons between these definitions and views will be made in order to find the main theoretical sources for this thesis. At the end of this chapter, some relative concepts to discreteness will be introduced. In Chapter Two, literature reviews will be provided. Since the academic achievements in home are very limited, the literature reviews about discreteness will mainly focus on the papers from linguists in abroad, which will be divided into two parts, dichotomous views and neutral views. Meanwhile the literature reviews about ambiguity will help us find the limitations of the traditional approach, thus finding the feasibility of analyzing English ambiguity based on discreteness. According to the distinct manifestations in English ambiguity, discreteness will be analyzed from explicit and implicit aspects. Chapter Three gives analyses about explicit discreteness in English ambiguity while Chapter Four will focus on implicit discreteness. In conclusion, the achievement and creativity of this study will be summarized, some limitations of the study will be pointed out and suggestions for the future researches will be also put forward.