Discreteness-Continuity Mechanism Of English Verb Transitivity From Cognitive Perspective

Transitivity has been a hot topic for many domestic and foreign linguists and it hasbecome an important problem to be researched by them. The linguists of differentapproaches focus on this problem from various perspectives with several reasons,among them, the most obvious one is that transitivity is a central phenomenon in thestructure of human languages. In the meanwhile, transitivity appears to be universal,which means no matter what kind of language it is, it should be related to transitivity.That is the reason why transitivity can grasp the main attention of linguists fromdifferent countries.The research of transitivity has already achieved a lot, but still has its inadequacies.Traditional grammar, especially Generative Linguistics did a systematic and profoundstudy on transitivity from syntactic perspective. It divides clauses into transitive clausesand intransitive clauses. The clauses with a direct object are classified as transitiveclauses and those without a direct object as intransitive clauses. Due to the binary natureof Generative Linguistics, many problems left unsolved, such as: not all the clauses withobjects are transitive clauses and not all the clauses with objects can be turned intopassive forms; it is also difficult for Generative Linguistics to explain middleconstruction in depth; some intransitive clauses can be followed by object in somecondition, etc. The linguists begin to be aware of the fact that there is a transitivitydiscreteness-continuity continuum of English verbs.Therefore, in order to solve the problems left over, linguists from other schools paymore attention to transitivity, and the most prominent achievements are done byfunctional and cognitive approach. Functional Linguistics regards transitivity as asemantic system representing concept and studies the construal process of humanexperience from functional perspective. Cognitive Linguistics even lays emphasis ontransitivity and this dissertation also focuses on transitivity from cognitive perspective.Cognitive linguists also do research in transitivity from different angles, includingtransitivity in discourse, in semantics and in constructions. This dissertation employs thetheories of Cognitive Linguistics as the theoretical basis, they are: discreteness and continuity of language, especially Langacker’s view on discreteness and continuity,prototype theory and construction grammar. Based on the achievements of Hopper&Thompson, this dissertation focuses on the factors of influencing transitivity scale ondifferent levels by analyzing verbs, clauses and the arguments. According to theseanalyses, we can know that the transitivity scales of the verbs are influencing thestructure and the semantic changes of the clauses directly. In addition, this dissertationalso defines transitivity prototype through analyzing the maximally distinguishedarguments hypothesis in order to show that arguments also influence the degree oftransitivity a lot.The significance of this study, which is also the innovative part, is to construct atransitivity continuum. This transitivity continuum consists of two levels, transitivityprototype and the intermediates. However, the most important part of this dissertation isthe analysis of transitivity intermediates, particularly for the research of the hot issue inrecent years, middle construction and some other kinds of intermediates. Based on thesetwo levels of research, this dissertation constructs a transitivity continuum tentativelyand explains the operation mechanism in depth. My new findings can broaden the viewsfor the future research to some extent, which can bring theoretical and practicalsignificances to English syntactic teaching and scales of transitivity can give rise to thevariation of syntactic structure and semantic change.