English Actives: A Cognitive Perspective

English actives have rarely been treated as a prototype category in earlier studies. Traditional grammar always deals with actives by distinguishing 'active voice' and 'passive voice'. Though the voice distinctions based on the morphosyntactic markings of verbs are sometimes adequate in separating active sentences from passive ones, they give rise to some problems, a typical one being the description of some sentences as notional passives with active form. When formalists approach the topic, they tend to focus on the algorithm of principles and rules by viewing grammar as an autonomous system, and to capture meaning in terms of truth conditions, neglecting the effect of human conceptualization on meaning construction. This approach renders them somewhat unable to account for some linguistic phenomena in a natural and organic way.Having prototype theory as the theoretical foundation, this thesis aims to categorize actives and related constructions by prototype and give a unified account to their relationships by employing a generalization-deduction method combined with experimentation. The thesis argues that categorization of linguistic objects should be based on their semantic characterization rather than morphosyntactic behavior, and that the prototype categorization of actives is no exception. Following the lines in cognitive grammar, the thesis assigns considerable analysis to the semantic structure of English actives, which is generally described as the construal of an action chain, and different expressions describing a situation are believed to represent different construals of the situation. With this notional basis, the thesis proposes a definition of the active prototype, and explicates how the grammatical constructions are extended with reference to the prototype in constual and coding. Findings show that the prototype effects manifest in the...