ICM Approach To The English Passive Construction

Having reviewed the previous literature from the traditional, structural, transformational and cognitive approaches, we detected more or less problems or incompleteness. In this thesis, we turn to the ICM (idealized cognitive model) approach to the study of the English passive construction. ICM is cognitive in that it is evolved from the interaction between human beings and the external world.Following the Lakoff's ICM theory, we put forward the suggested ICM for the English passive construction with the combination of Croft's EICM (ICM of events) denoted by verbs and the commonly shared findings in this regard. As one of the by-products of ICM, prototype effects enable us to explore the differentiation between the prototype and the non-prototype of the English passive construction.We first detect the relationship between the passive and the active, discarding the absolute idea of the pure active-passive correspondence. We find that only the active having the truly affected entity can be passivized. Besides, the passive and the active have different mechanisms of generation. Then we find that the syntactic structure: NP+BE+V-en (mono-transitive) (+by-phrase) can be ascribed to the prototype, where the by-phrase is optional. This construction construes the causative event into the stative event from the perspective of the affected entity. Therefore, it denotes far more than merely one state, i.e. the stative event. In this regard, it counts to differentiate the prototype from the syntactically prototype-like construction. Then, we proceed to study other constructions, including the passive construction with transitive-stative V-en, the passive construction with di-transitive V-en and the get-passive construction. It turns out that they depart from the features of the suggested ICM for the English passive construction more or less, thus ascribed to the non-prototype. The passive constructions with transitive-stative V-en and with di-transitive V-en both involve three participants though they can be coerced into the cause-become-state structure, thus construing the causative event into the stative state. The get-passive construction...