A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Progressive Aspect: Perspective Of Conceptual Metonymy And Coercion

Aspect has long been one of the focuses of linguists both at home and abroad. But so far,it seems that no linguistic works has systematically touched upon the contrastive analysis of situation aspect in English and Chinese progressive aspect, especially from the coercion and metonymy perspective.The construction grammar view of meaning(Goldberg,1995) assumes that linguistic meaning is a property not only of lexical items but of larger linguistic units as well,i.e.grammatical constructions.According to her viewpoint,the overall sentence meaning results from the interaction of both constructional and lexical meaning.These meanings may be compatible or conflict with each other.While the two meaning are compatible,they will reinforce each other.And if the two meanings are in conflict,two possible outcomes will arise:the sentence may be conceptually anomalous or the conflict may be resolved by one meaning taking precedence over the other by coercion.As far as the aspect is concerned,the incongruity is generally referred to confliction of the co-occurrence of lexical(Aktionsart) aspectual types with incompatible grammatical aspectual categories.With the development of cognitive linguistics,people gradually realize that metonymy,like metaphor,is not only a linguistic form but also a powerful cognitive tool for us to conceptualize the world.Thornburg(1999b) claims that the conceptual metonymy is helpful for the identification of the coerced meaning when a construction meaning conflict with another meaning(lexical or constructional).When no metonymic link can be established then no coercion occurs and the sentence becomes unacceptable.Li Yongzhong(2004),also states that whether there are metonymic relations or not among the lexical meaning and constructional meaning has the final say. As far as the progressive construction is concerned,Langacker(1986) puts forward that the meaning or the essence of the progressive is to represent an active(or dynamic) action as a state.Thus the progressive construction should be an activity-type selector;meanwhile,it also works as a stativizer,as the predicate in the progressive is a state,not an event.If the requirements of activity property of the input radical and state nature of the whole construction are violated,the mechanism of coercion will be triggered.This thesis is committed to exploring the coercion operations of the five lexical class,that is,states(STA),activities(ACT), accomplishments(ACC),achievements(ACH) and semelfactives(SMF) in the progressive construction both in English and Chinese from a contrastive perspective. By contrastive analysis,we find that progressive construction,whether in Chinese or in English,can co-occur with activities,accomplishments and semelfactives.The conflicts between the VP complement and the progressive construction can be successfully resolved by the coercion operation of permutation.But marked differences show when the progressive correlates with the other two Vendlerian classes of verbs,i.e.,statives and achievements,which we have given a detailed illustration in chapter 4.By our study,we also reinforce the fact that the English progressive can be used to denote an event at its preliminary stage and ongoing stage, the Chinese progressive,on the other hand,makes reference to the ongoing and resultative state of the event.As to the accounting for the similarities and differences,we propose that metonymic coercion motivates the formation and meaning construal of English and Chinese progressive construction.When no metonymic link can be established then no coercion occurs and the sentence becomes unacceptable.And the generality of the usage of progressive construction comes from the fact that all the people throughout the world share almost the same cognitive models in the perception of the out word, and the individuality is due to the fact that people percept the world from different angles.To a certain degree,we may say that metonymy's impact on linguistic Structure is a promising field that needs to be more cultivated.This thesis is only about our preliminary step on this field,surely we will devote more energy to it in future research.