A Cognitive Study Of Serial Verb Construction In English And Chinese

As a kind of linguistic phenomenon, Serial Verb Construction (SVC) is widelydistributed in many languages of the world. It is because of its universality that it attractslots of scholars’ attention for over one hundred years. However, from the languagessurveyed, the studies on SVC abroad are mostly confined to some single language inAfrican and Asian or Creole languages of the Atlantic and Pacific; from the researchcontents, its internal structure is more focused. Few researchers investigate whether thereexists the similar structure in English, a most widely-used language. As a typical seriallanguage, on the other, the whole history of study on Chinese SVC is also filled withdisputes and divergences. Its research method and theoretical basis depend more on traditional grammar analysis and much attention is paid to its structure and meaning. Thestudy from the cognitive and comparative point of view is rare.By means of the theory of construction grammar proposed by Goldberg (1995),choosing the examples from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) andCorpus of Center for Chinese Linguistic PKU (CCCL), this thesis makes an investigationon SVC with come/go in English and with lai/qu in Chinese. Through the analysis, it isproved that SVC does exist in English and this discovery also provides the possibility forcomparative study. On the basis, the features of SVC in the two languages arerespectively probed from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. In addition, theinheritance relations between constructions are proclaimed. Then it points out that eachconstruction has its own syntactic stipulation, semantic and pragmatic constraints, whichmust be learnt on the basis of input.In order to further explain the linguistic phenomenon, from the cognitiveperspective, the thesis makes a probe on the status of members of SVC and its formativemechanism. The image schema of each construction is given. Finally, it is concluded thatbecause of living in the same earth family the English people and Chinese people havesimilar abilities in schematic generalization. However, the different thinking mode andcultural tradition formed long ago can cause the detailed differences, i.e. the differentcognitive sequence. Figure (F) is prior to Ground (G) in English while Chinese is justreverse.The study from the view of cognition and contrast can deepen our understanding onuniversality and individuality of the two languages. Moreover, it will play an active rolein grammatical analysis and teaching, the comparative study of English-Chinese andtranslation.