A Cognitive Semantic Analysis Of Non-nominal Structure Following "Kind Of"

As one of the most important subjects in the 21st century, cognitive linguistics develops in a rapid rate. It is a branch of cognitive science and a combination of cognitive psychology and linguistics. Cognitive linguistics studies on linguistic forms, meanings and rules on the basis of cognition. In this branch of science, morphology and syntax are not independent, but are affected and restricted by functional, semantic and pragmatic factors. Cognitive linguistics not only has a great impact on the whole linguistic field, but also affects and changes human thinking patterns and living styles to some extent. Cognitive semantics, as an indispensable branch of cognitive linguistics, caused great attention in the language study area. It is the study on language development, history, and linguistic features through the research on language meanings. Corpus is a critical tool for linguistic study, since the universality and typicality of semantic range provide language study and research with powerful support and ensurence.This thesis focuses on the analysis of the semantic features of non-nominal construction following "kind of", including verbal, adverbial and adjective expressions in collocation with "kind of. In traditional English grammar, the polysemy of "kind of is regarded as a special case of grammatical expression. This thesis tries to explain the non-nominal structure by means of corpus analysis, theory of construal of space and ICM.This paper falls into five major parts. The first part is an introduction to the background and significance of this study, and we illustrate the differences of preposition use between the "kind of structure and other prepositional phrases. The second part is literature review. It is mainly a general introduction to definitions and orientations of cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics and cognitive grammar. Current cognitive study conditions on prepositions at home and abroad are listed in this part, from the perspective of construal of space and lexical variant. Specifically there is a detailed introduction to the study of preposition "of". The third part lists some points in methodology. There are four sub-categories of methodology in this part. They are corpus-based language study, quantitative and qualitative analysis, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, and introspective methods. The body of this thesis lies in the fourth part. Through the analysis of data and sample sentences from corpus, we discuss the semantic formation of non-nominal construction following "kind of and reach the conclusion that there are mainly two categories of non-nominal expressions-quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative expressions include definitive adjectives, comparative and calculating verbal structures. Qualitative category includes deductible verbal expressions, qualitative adjective structures, and attentive and inattentive adverbial constructions. The last part is conclusion, in which we summarize the whole study in this thesis and point out the limitations and future orientation of this study.