On English Body-Part Ascension Construction And Its Cognitive-functional Motivations

The Body Part Ascension Construction (henceforward BPAC for short) is a syntactic-semantically unique construction. According to John Saeed (1997), it is a term first proposed by Beth Levin (Levin 1993) in her study of the semantics of English verbs (in fact, her original term is"Body-Part Possessor Ascension"). It is actually a structure which Charles Fillmore (1970) terms as possessor raising, a syntactic-semantically unique construction involving alternations of argument structure, that is, the construction allows the pronoun denoting the possessor in the object to be raised to occupy the objective place, whereas the possessed (usu. a certain part of human body) follows as a preposition object. The syntactic-semantic structure uniqueness of BPAC and the native speakers'preference in its use indicate that there must be some deep cognitive-functional motivations behind them. At present, there seems to be little literature directly concerning this monographic study, which is worth a close investigation.The thesis starts with a general introduction of BPAC in Chapter 1, and then reviews the theories and literature concerning the research of BPAC in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 focuses on parsing the syntactic-semantic structure of BPAC, indicating that the syntactic-semantic structure of BPAC and its cognitive-functional motivations can only be fully investigated from the perspectives of construction grammar, cognitive grammar and functional grammar. From the viewpoint of Goldberg's construction grammar, Chapter 4 concentrates on analyzing the relations within BPAC and across the concerning constructions, which focuses on a logical analysis, a structural analysis and a metaphorical extension analysis. Chapter 5 investigates the cognitive-functional motivations for BPAC, focusing on iconic motivations and analyses of the process of conceptualization, gestalt cognition and the process of grammaticalization. And finally reaches a conclusion in Chapter 6:Constructions reflect man's way of understanding the world; or rather constructions are representations of man's conceptualization of the world. Constructional meaning cannot come from nothing, its ultimate motivation can be found in the interaction among the rules of reality, the human cognitive competence and the language system itself. The cognitive-functional motivations for BPAC found out in the thesis are:1) BPAC is'sensitive to the notion of contact'and meanwhile rules out'pure change of state'.2)'part-to-whole connection'and'part-to-whole spread'are necessary preconditions for BPAC.3) Its conceptual structure corresponds to man's experiential structure, hence it has iconic motivations.4) BPAC follows general human experience, retrieves the overall flow of the event from the after part to the before part via abduction.5) BPAC accords with man's tendency for gestalt cognition, depicts the overall flow of events, profiles the whole and illuminates man's subjective consciousness, thus bears some sense of humanity.6) BPAC is a more fine-grained way of expressing, and more accords with the way of thinking of English people, who are used to and good at logical analyses from the whole to seek out its internal structure and other details, valuing processes rather than results. Therefore, BPAC is prevailing in use and gradually grammaticalized, and some expressions even have been entrenched as idioms.