The Semantic Change Of Visual Verb SEE And Subjectification

This study mainly focuses on the general trend of the semantic changes of visual verb SEE and the motivations for such changes from a diachronic perspective. Lexical semantic change is always one of the hottest focuses in linguistic studies. In the past due to the influence of rationalism, the study on lexical semantic change was limited to descriptions of the changing features and the historical relationship among different items of a word, and laid little weight on the motivations for semantic change. Since the 1950s, due to the influence of the renaissance of humanism and the emergence of functionalism and pragmatics, people laid more and more attention to the role of extralinguistic factors in the language semantic change. When the cognitive linguistics appeared in 1970s, linguists apply the cognitive science into the explanation to language semantic change, and start to investigate the subjectivity and subjectification of language, and find that there are certain principles in the language semantic change, among which grammaticalization and subjectification theories are the two most influential. American cognitive linguist Traugott holds the beliefs that lexical semantic change is a subjectification process, a semantic-pragmatic process in which the subjectivity degree of language expressions is changing from low to high degree. This study focuses on the research into the visual verb SEE's semantic changes within the theoretical framework of Traugott's subjectification theory and Sweetser's three domains theory, and concludes that the general trend of SEE's semantic changes corresponds with the cline of"from the physical domain to the mental domain and then to the speech-act domain", and the SEE usage in speech-act domain is an obvious subjectification process; the motivations for this subjectification goes on like this: in the process of cognition, people always connect their cognitive objective—a specific event with a specific time or place, and the event forms a kind of stereotypical relationship proximity with the time or place in the mind, and all the elements form a conceptual structure as a whole; then in some specific context, through two mechanisms of...