A Cognitive Study Of Causative Construction: Causative Continuum, Prototype And Spatial Metaphor Model

Causation, whose mapping onto language is causative construction, is an indispensable concept in human life. Conventional linguistic study puts an emphasis on causative verbs, which are the core in the formation of causative constructions, and classifies them into lexical causative, morphological causative and analytic causative. Cognitive linguists consider causative constructions as comprising causal events. Cognitive study on causative constructions covers many aspects, but this thesis studies three of them: the causative continuum, the prototypical model, and the spatial-metaphor model. The causative continuum is composed of direct causation, sociative causation and indirect causation, among which, sociative causation as an intermediary is characterized by the features of both direct and indirect causation. It is a new concept in the cognitive study of causative constructions; based on the prototype features of causative constructions, this research selects morphological causative as the best candidate for the prototype, which is the causativization of the previous non-causative verbs. This process is characterized by regularity and productivity. Since the canonical event model of Langacker (1991) shares many features with the prototype, this research combines morphological causative with this model and obtains the prototype of causative constructions: The spatial metaphor model, which extends from time-as-space metaphor and event-as-space metaphor, is a further cognitive explanation of causative constructions, and the event-as-space metaphor in this research improves the model proposed by King (1988). The methods adopted and results obtained in this study will prove to be helpful to further studies of causative constructions.