The Cognitive Reasons For Adverbial Raising

Adverbial raising, that is adverbial is raised as subject called full inversion as well, moreover, it is raised as object. It is one of the most controversial and most frequently used construction in Chinese grammar and has been fascinating many linguists for years and it seems to be gaining even more prominence of attention in current research circle recently. Historically, attempts have been made in almost all the general approaches to it, namely, generative, functional and cognitive approaches. Although different approaches have been applied to the investigation of the specific linguistic phenomenon, this thesis attempts to employ a newly born but prosperous approach—cognitive approach to the investigation of this issue. It uses figure and ground theory, action chain theory and decategorizaition theory to make some researches on the adverbial raised as subject and object respectively. The figure-ground theory and the action chain theory embody the prominence view in cognitive linguistics.Both adverbial raised as subject and adverbial raised as object are regarded as adverbial raising. Thus, the former researchers made the survey on respective side. Here, the author makes a full research on that, the semantic changes have been explored as well.