A Prototype Study Of The Voice In English As A Semantic Continuum

Voice,as a significant grammatical category,has always been a hotissue for different linguistic schools.The researches so far made disagreeon the sub-categories of voice.Structuralists and formalists think thatvoice contains only two subcategories,the active voice and the passivevoice,but functionalists say voice has three subcategories,the activevoice,the passive voice and the middle voice.These linguistic schoolsstudy voice from the perspective of form and function only;they neglectthe relationship between voice and human cognition,and,therefore,failto provide cognitive motivations for the generation and existence of thelinguistic data concerning voice in English.This thesis,by proceedingfrom the relationship between the generation of voice and humancognition,has studied the linguistic data concerning voice in English andfound out the cognitive motivations for their generation and existence inthe language.In view of the principle in the prototype theory concerning therelationship between neighboring prototype categories,this thesis believes that the voice of the English verb is a semantic continuum,thetwo extremes of the continuum are the prototypical members of the twosubcategories of voice,the active voice and the passive voice,andbetween the two extremes stand the non-prototypical members of the twosubcategories and the overlapping area between them.The study shows that this view conforms to the reality of English and can reasonably explain the following linguistic data: After a full prototype analysis of voice as a semantic continuum,thisthesis has probed into the motivations for the generation and existence ofthe continuum.The thesis holds that the generation and existence of voiceas a continuum is the linguistic reflection of the result of human cognitionof the objective world:people not only cognize events from differentperspectives but also cognize different features of objects;differentcognizing activities form different cognitive concepts,which are thenreflected in the language as different linguistic expressions.The result of the study in this thesis suggests that researching thevoice of the English verb from a cognitive perspective can uncover theintrinsic relationship between the different expressions within thissemantic continuum and human cognition,which can play a positive rolein understanding and using these expressions.