The Generation And Expansion Of The "Give" Concept And The "Give" Sentence In English

The "give" event is one of the most basic and common event categories in human experience. It refers to such a situation in which a giver passes the control over something to the recipient, which causes the thing being transferred to change its ownership or location after that. The "give" concept is the result of human conceptualization of the "give" event in the physical world. At the same time, this concept plays an important role in people's conceptualization of the world.Based on the prototype category theory of cognitive linguistics, this thesis has made a study of the generation and expansion of the "give" concept and the "give" sentence in English. First, the thesis has analyzed the experiential basis of the generation of the "give" concept and the motivation and mechanism of the expansion. Then on the basis of the "give" concept, the thesis has probed into the generation and expansion of the "give" sentence and the syntactic features of its prototype and non-prototypes.The study shows that the prototype of the "give" concept refers to the concept in which a human giver transfers control over a physical concrete object to a human recipient instantaneously and directly, which causes the thing being transferred to change its ownership or location directly and visibly. The focus of this concept is the direct physical transfer of concrete objects. The prototype of the concept is the cognitive result of the conceptualization of the physical "give" events that are most perceptible and typical in the objective world. With the increase of experience and the development of their cognitive abilities, people proceed to conceptualize the non-prototypical "give" events which involve indirect "give" relation or non-physical "give" relation in the social and mental world. With the help of the metaphorical thinking of the human mind, and with the prototype of the "give" concept as its reference point, people begin to conceptualize non-prototypical "give" events through the mechanism of metaphor and metonymy, thus the non-prototypes of the "give" concept are formed. The most salient feature of the non-prototypes of the "give" concept is that there is no direct physical transfer of the thing being transferred.The study also shows that, through the process of representation, the "give" concept is mapped into language and generates the "give" sentence. The prototype of the "give" concept is represented by the prototypical "give" sentence, and the non-prototype of the "give" concept is represented by the non-prototypical "give" sentence. The nucleus of the prototype of the "give" sentence is the prototypical "give" verb, which represents the prototypical manner of giving in the "give" concept. The focal semantic feature of the prototypical "give" verbs is the physical direct transfer of the concrete objects. According to different results caused by the manner of giving, the prototypical "give" sentence in English falls into two forms:the cause-to-receive "give" sentence, represented by NP+V+NP1+NP2; and the cause-to-move "give" sentence, represented by NP+V+NP2+TO+NP1. The non-prototypical "give" verbs semantically comprise three types:verbs reflecting the potential transfer of physical objects; verbs reflecting the invisible transfer of abstract things; and verbs reflecting the transfer of force and events. Non-prototypical "give" verbs are the basis of non-prototypical "give" sentences.