An Extensive Exploration Into The Irregular Collocations Of V+NP

It has been traditionally considered grammatical that transitive verbs take a noun as the object while intransitive ones do not. However, it often occurs that transitive verbs take no noun, while intransitive ones sometimes do take a noun. Moreover, even if a transitive verb takes a noun, it is never the patient as is supposed to be, but various concepts like place, instrument, time, etc., especially in Chinese. All these three situations are by no means grammatical in the eyes of traditional grammarians.Starting from the Chinese verb "吃", the paper deals with these irregular phenomena from a cognitive perspective. With the cognitive frame of a verb, a set of inter-related latent concepts have been provided for the various collocations. Then, cognitive principles, those of prominence, specificity and perspective, function together to get some of these latent concepts realized on the syntactic level. Meanwhile, the principle of prominence functions in two sections. Firstly, the principle entitles various concepts with different degrees of prominence, which leads to various syntactic statuses. Generally speaking, when transferred to linguistic expressions, agent becomes subject, patient object, and other concepts various adverbials. Therefore, concepts are arranged into corresponding slots of a sentence. Nevertheless, extra prominence may be given to some concepts, as the speaker may want to fulfill particular needs in communication. As a result, the original prominence scalar is disordered, and what follows is the rearrangement of their syntactic statuses. For example, concepts of place, instrument or time may be raised from adverbials to objects because of extra prominence they receive. Thus, an ungrammatical sentence pattern comes into being.Apart from the cognitive factors, the parataxis feature of the Chinese language also plays an important role. By parataxis, we mean that the Chinese language attaches little importance to cohesive devices, that is, the logic form of a sentence. As long as it can be understood, its logic form in the light of syntax is not very important. Thus, parataxis accounts for the popularity of these "ungrammatical" expressions in Chinese, which in effect makes these "ungrammatical" collocations grammatical in Chinese.Besides, it has been found that transitive verbs with nouns other than the patient after them are of the same nature as intransitive verbs with various nouns, and both of them can be well illustrated in a cognitive way. In other words, certain concepts in the cognitive frame have been highlighted through the principles of prominence, specificity and perspective and they in turn gain some extra prominence and then are raised to objects from adverbials.