The WPM Analysis Of English Path Windowing In Motion Event

In 1996, Talmy, based on his Event Frame Theory, proposed the Windowing of Attention Theory in which he viewed the adverbial of location as the PATH element of motion event. He analyzed the cognitive process of the foregrounding of a certain element in the event frame, holding that in linguistic expressions, a speaker could foreground a certain stage of the PATH, initial, medial or final, by opening the windowing of attention. However, he did not mention that how many prepositions could designate PATH and what the practical windowing patterns were. In order to fill the gap, this research proposes the Windowing-Prominence-Metaphor (WPM) model for the study of collocation of 10 motion verbs of most high-frequency and the prepositions following them.In WPM model, W means "Windowing of Attention"; P means "Prominence Principle" and M means "Metaphor". This study finds that only by integrating W, P and M can we provide a more reasonable explanation for PATH of motion verbs. Based on BNC corpus, we also investigate the co-occurrence of the 10 motion verbs and the prepositions following them in order to provide data for analyzing path windowing.The thesis has five chapters. The main contents are as follows:Chapter One is a general introduction to the scope and motivation, research objective, methodology and data collection and layout of the thesis.Chapter Two is literature review in which some related researches in terms of Event Frame and Windowing of Attention will be commented and their shortcomings will be pointed out.Chapter Three proposes a theoretical model of the study in which Talmy's Windowing of Attention will be modified as WPM model and a case study will be conducted to testify its feasibility.Chapter Four is data analysis and discussion. First,10 motion verbs of most high-frequency will be collected by combining 50 motion verbs under the subcategory of general motion in Roget's International Thesaurus and 1,112 verbs in verb list provided by BNC corpus. They are go, run, move, change, drive, rise, push, travel, climb and back. Second,200 tokens for each word will be collected from BNC corpus by random sampling, thus obtaining 2,000 tokens as a whole. Then, those tokens with prepositional phrase as path windowing will be picked out and tagged, thus forming a closed data for our research. Then the practical path windowing pattern in motion event frame will be investigated under WPM, supported by statistics and ratios.Chapter Five is a conclusion in which four contributions will be listed as follows:First, based on a qualitative and quantitative study of the path windowing in English motion event frame, we develop Talmy's theory into WPM model.Second, there are 31 prepositions which designate PATH in English motion event frame, accounting for 16.15% of all 192 prepositions. These prepositions are above, at, between, by, from, in, on, onto, out of, over, past, round, through, to, under, via, aboard, across, along, alongside, around, away from, down, into, off, on to, out, throughout, towards, up and up to.Third, we have found 20 path windowing patterns all together after investigating the database. Among them, the single and double windowing proposed by Talmy have the largest proportion, accounting for 95.76% of all.13 new path windowing patterns are found in corpus, with the percentage of only 4.24%. Two of the seven patterns proposed by Talmy, i.e. a+b and a+b+c, have not appeared in our database. The distribution of path windowing of the rest five types is substantially different, yet with certain regularity. The path windowings are mainly single windowings:initial, medial or final, accounting for 88.76% of all. Among them, the final path windowing is of the maximal percentage, accounting for 61.88% of all. The double path windowings are mainly a+c and b+c, both including c, accounting for 7% of all. These two numbers, i.e.61.88% and 7%, reflect that the path windowings in English motion event frames are mainly final path windowing, which shows that people mainly focus on the result of a motion. These are shown in the following table:Fourth, the metaphorical path has been researched for the first time on the basis of corpus. Among 31 prepositions designating path, there are 14 prepositions which signify metaphorical path, including to, from, into, through, out of, over, towards, along, down, above, alongside, in, on to and up to.At the ending of this thesis, some defects are mentioned and some suggestions are also provided for further investigations.