The Generation And Expansion Of The Comparison Concept And The Comparative Sentence In English

The comparison concept can be defined as a concept in which people compare two or two kinds of things or entities on the basis of their properties or behaviors and discover their similarities and differences. According to the different results of comparison, the comparison concept can be classified into the following three sub-concepts:the comparison of inequality, the comparison of equality and the comparison of superiority. The comparison of inequality refers to the concept in which the subject of comparison is different, or to put it more specifically, is above or below in degree with the object of comparison in one or more properties or behaviors; the comparison of equality refers to the concept in which the subject of comparison is similar to, or to be more concrete, identical or approximately identical in degree with the object of comparison in one or more properties or behaviors; the comparison of superiority refers to the concept in which the properties or behaviors of the subject of comparison is superior to all the other objects of comparison in their degree in a certain range.Within the framework of the prototype theory, the present paper has made a study of the generation and expansion of the comparative concept and the comparative sentence in English. Specific researches include the experiential basis of the generation, the semantic and syntactic features of the prototypes and non-prototypes, and the motivation, mechanisms and process of their expansion.The study shows that the prototype of the comparison concept can be defined as such:two concrete physical objects show some directly-perceptible similarities or differences in their shared properties or behaviors. The core of the prototypical comparison concept is the directly-perceptible similarities or differences, which refer to similarities or differences that can be seen, heard, smelled, or tasted by human sense organ directly. The prototype of the comparison concept is the cognitive result of the conceptualization of the physical comparable relationships that are most perceptible and thus most typical in the objective world. With the development of their cognitive abilities, human beings proceed to conceptualize the non-prototypical comparable relationships by means of metaphor and metonymy. The results of people's conceptualization on those complex and abstract comparable relationships are various kinds of non-prototypical comparison concepts.The study also shows that when the comparison concept is mapped into language, it generates the comparative sentence:the prototypical comparison concept generates the prototypical comparative sentence; the non-prototypical comparison concept generates non-prototypical comparative sentences. The comparative sentence falls into two types. The first type involves comparison in terms of property, which have three different sentence patterns to represent the comparison of equality, inequality and superiority respectively. The sentence patterns are "NP1 +be+as+adj+as+NP2","NP1+be+adj-er+than+NP2"and "NP1 +be+the+adj-est". The other type involves the comparison in terms of behavior, whose sentence patterns are "NP1+V+as+Adv+as+NP2", " NP1+V+adv-er+than+NP2 "and" NP1+V+the+adv-est". The key point of prototypical comparative sentences is their prototypical results of comparison, which are represented by adjectives or adverbs that are able to show some directly-perceptible similarities and differences. The results of non-prototypical comparative sentences are represented by adjectives or adverbs which reflect some indirectly-perceptible similarities and differences in their properties or behaviors. To conceive these non-prototypical comparative sentences, people should resort to psychological cognition and metaphor cognitive devices.