A Cognitive Study Of The Voice Of The English Verb

Different grammatical schools, grammarians and scholars have done some research on the voice of the English verb and they have made achievements in different aspects. However, most of the previous studies are confined to the language itself, without reflecting the cognitive processing of human beings in using a language. In recent years, some linguists and scholars have begun to do research on voice from a cognitive perspective, but limitations exist in their studies. Adopting a cognitive approach, we choose the voice of the English verb as the study object. On the basis of the theory of cognitive linguistics such as the formation of image, the figure / ground principle and the canonical event model, we center on the following aspects: the cognitive definition of voice, the generation and understanding of voice, and the choosing of correct voice form. It is hoped that the study will help to understand better the form and the meaning of the voice, to be better aware of the cognitive background and the psychological basis of the generation of voice, and to master the correct use of voice in the language practice. It is also hoped that such an effort will be of great help to the understanding of the relationship between language and cognition.In this thesis, voice is defined from the cognitive perspective as a grammatical category of the English verb which mirrors the language user's perspective on an event. Under the grammatical category of the voice of the English verb, there are two subcategories: the active voice and the passive voice. The prototypical active voice construes the whole process of an event from the perspective of the agent. The passive voice is not a derived voice. It is the marked voice form and construes the whole process of an event from the perspective of an affected entity.A cognitive analysis of the basic sentence structures in the active voice is made on the basis of the canonical event model. In the unmarkedsituation, the participants in the focus function as the main part of a sentence, while the setting is expressed by an adverbial modifier. In a case where only one participant is involved, this participant will function as the clausal subject. As there is no energy transmission from one participant to another, intransitive clauses are accommodated. In a case where more than one participant is involved, the participants function as the main part of a sentence, transitive clauses are accommodated. However, the speaker may opt for choosing subjects and objects for other communicative objectives. In the marked situation, the setting may be raised to the status of the syntactic figure or ground, and clauses such as She lives in Shanghai, The garden is swarming with bees, There was an explosion are thus accommodated.The passive voice in English is not a derived voice. It is the product of the necessity to express different meanings. The passive construction can be classified into the long passive and the short passive according to the agent explicitness. According to the auxiliary verb used in the construction, the passive takes two forms: the BE-passive and the GET-passive. The fundamental difference in meaning between the BE-passive and the GET-passive leads to their difference in collocation, emotional color and agent explicitness. The passive voice construes the whole process of an event from the perspective of the affected entity. Whether passive sentences are possible or not depends on whether or not the following conditions are satisfied. First, there should be two or more than two interacting participants. Second, one participant must be affected by another, so we can construe the process from the perspective of the affected participant. The three grammatical morphemes (be, -ed and by) in the passive construction are meaningful. Be indicates that the subject in the passive construction passively receives the action done to it by the agent. For the passive voice, there is a reversal of figure/ground. The -ed marker is used to indicate the change of direction of the force. By...