A Cognitive Approach To Grammaticalization Of The Visual Verb SEE

Grammaticalization has been viewed as the process where a linguistic form with concrete meaning transforms from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status, which is symbolized in the form of systematic changes on the levels of pronunciation, semantic structure, syntactic structure and so on. Earlier researches on grammaticalization mainly focused on the description of semantic changes in the approach of structural linguistics. Since the appearance of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, researches on grammaticalization have turned to the exploration of the underlying mechanisms and motivations of semantic changes, and most importantly, of grammaticalization. For all the words in human language, the most frequently-used ones have a high tendency to be grammaticalized. among which are the visual verbs. In regard to the grammaticalization of visual verbs, the current research chooses the English visual verb SEE as a specific case and attempts to explore the grammaticalized process from the aspects of semantic change, image schema and syntactic structure, through the event cognitive pattern. Based on the analysis of semantic change, image schema and syntactic structure, this research aims to discover the general characteristics and the cognitive mechanisms of SEE's grammaticalized process.According to Sweesters Theory of Three Domains, different senses of SEE are re-classified into physical domain, mental domain and speech-act domain. And the semantic change of SEE follows the route of physical domain�'mental domain�'speech-act domain, i.e. from the concrete "visual behavior" to the abstract "causal connective", as a result of metaphorization and metonymization. Metaphor is the mapping between different domains according to similarity principle, and in the case of grammaticalization of SEE, the mapping is from physical domain to mental domain, and then from mental domain to speech-act domain. Metonymy, on the other hand, works within the same domain, by shifting the focus of semantic elements, representing the whole action by a typical behavior, and transformation from behavior manner to intention.Image schema is the conceptual structure of meaning stored in people's mind, so it is the cognitive basis of meaning, which can be further confirmed by the identical extension path with SEE's semantic change, from physical domain to mental domain and finally to speech-act domain. The development of SEE's image schema is motivated by the changes of force in different domains:in physical domain, SEE presents a kind of behavioral force which is changed into the perceptional force in mental domain and the inferential force in speech-act domain. In the meantime, the extension process of SEE's image schema is not a series of unrelated saltation, but rather a continuum of gradual change.following the path A----(A,B)----B.The syntactic changes presented in the grammaticalization process of SEE can be realized in the forms of sole event, coherent event, nesting event and complex event, the mechanisms of which come from the similarity between concept and experience, differences in the degree of animacy of SEE's Object and in the construal perspectives of a scene.Besides the changes on levels of meaning, image schema and syntactic structure, the grammaticalization of English visual verb SEE shows an intensive tendency of subjectification, which develops from objective description to subjective narration. The subjectification can be realized by the language users'spirits, personal emotions and knowledge structures as well as the choice of perspective in the construal of an objective scene in reality.Even though some researchers have analyzed the grammaticalization of visual verbs, most of them focused on the comparative study of different visual verbs, and few are dedicated to the specific verb SEE in the light of cognitive linguistics. Hopefully, through the analysis of SEE's grammaticalization on the level of semantic change, image schema and syntax in the event cognitive pattern, this research can provide a relatively comprehensive description and explanation to the grammaticalization of visual verbs and also to the mechanisms and motivations of grammaticalization.