Structural Salience And Imagery Building

By adopting a cognitive approach, the thesis conducts a study regarding the configuration and motivation of English partitive construction. Langacker's cognitive grammar (CG) is used as the theoretical basis of the thesis.Since the concept of number in English is mainly realized by the contrast between singularity and plurality, the study specific to partitive construction rarely arouses people's attention. A small number of scholars, such as Halliday (from the functional approach) and Jackendoff (from the conceptual semantic approach), have analyzed its internal structure, which broadens our horizon and encourages us to do more research in this field. The thesis is a tentative analysis of English partitive construction, aiming to provide a natural and sound account for its internal working mechanisms and motivations.Any valid grammatical construction is symbolic in nature. English partitive construction is a linguistic phenomenon characterized by symbolizing and schematizing the process of conceptualization. It is found that in partitive construction, i.e. "a + n₁ + of+ n₂", the choice of n₁ and the integration of n₁ and n₂ rely on people's different perspectives and ways of profiling. As people differ in their courses of conceptualization, a conceived scene is to be construed in alternate ways and expressed in various linguistic forms. In brief, the thesis holds that English partitive construction represents the working mechanisms of salience in the mind of conceptualizes. Grounded on the salience of conceptual structure, three kinds of imagery are combined with respect to the understanding of English partitive construction. They are the imagery in cognitive psychology, the imagery in CG and the imagery as an equivalent of metaphor.Structural salience is of vital importance to the cognitive study of...