A Contrastive Study Of The VO Construction Between Chinese And English

The study of the VO construction has been considered as one of the most important subjects to linguists around the world.Consequently many enlightening researches have been conducted in this field.Nevertheless,most of them were focused only on the problems of the subject-object relationship or Chinese-specific VO construction without any typological evidence.In view of these problems,we decide to conduct a contrastive study of the VO construction between Chinese and English under the banner of cognitive linguistics.From the perspectives of Prototype Theory and Construction Grammar,we adopt an approach of combining the theoretical reasoning with the case study to reveal the similarities and differences of the VO constructions between both languages.The main ideas of the thesis are stated as follows.We divide the contrastive study into two parts:one is about the verb contrastive study and the other is about the VO contrastive study.The first part will be concerned with the contrastive study of吃and eat on their internal and external syntactic-semantic features so that a systematic observation on the verbs will be guaranteed.The following part of the VO study will make a reference to the first part.According to the Prototype Theory,we attempt to establish a category for eating verbs and identify the prototype in this category,i.e.吃and eat.We agree that the prototypical object and the VO constructional meaning are the patient and the action-and-patient meaning respectively.According to the VO prototypical meaning, we distinguish two VO constructions,that is,the prototypical VO construction and the atypical VO construction.Among the atypical VO construction we identify the metaphorical VO construction and the metonymic VO construction and term them according to the way they are formed. Consequently the prototypical VO construction is the one that assumes the prototypical meaning.The metaphorical VO construction is the one formed by way of conceptual metaphor while the metonymic VO construction is the one formed by way of metonymy.They form a continuum and relate to the prototypical VO construction.Through our investigation,the metaphorical and metonymic VO constructional meanings are negation and comparison respectively which influence and confine the possible objects that can occur in the constructions.The metaphorical VO construction allows the elements that imply the negative meaning like亏,败etc.to occur in the construction while entities that contain the opposite meaning like甜,胜利etc.are forbidden.Similarly, the metonymic VO construction permits entities that form a cognitive comparison by themselves like大碗(小碗),馆子(食堂)etc.to occur in the construction while those unmarked entities like碗,厨房etc.are excluded.Both of the two principles operate successfully on condition that no particular demand is presented in a context.As opposed to the difference between Chinese and English VO construction with the verbs of high frequency, we follow the research of Shi Yuzhi (2004,2006),borrowing a concept "vector" from mathematics,and arguing that the different specifications of Chinese and English verb conceptualization may as well affect the formation of their VO constructions.The specific vectorial direction on English verbs requires the co-occurrence of both the subject and the object so as to mark the beginning and end of the direction while the subject and the object in Chinese can sometimes be omitted owing to the vague vectorial direction,which offers the possibility for other non-patient semantic stuffs to occupy the object position.