Decategorization In Some "Irregular" Chinese And English Usage

This thesis mainly deals with one kind of particular linguistic phenomenon, thatis,"irregularities" or "non-ideal" linguistic constructions on the lexical and thesyntactic level, such as VO+O,ADV+N, tautology, middle construction, atypicalpassive construction BEI+XX in Chinese etc.. These constructions are always beingneglected or put into the box of "irregularities" by transformational-generativelinguistics for the sake of theoretical consistency. In this thesis, decategorization, theopposite process of categorization will be adopted as the main theoretical mechanismfor explanations of various "irregular" or atypical constructions in both Chinese andEnglish, especially in modern Chinese. Semantic extensions and innovations of thesenewly-emerged "irregular" linguistic examples in our daily language usage, which aremanifested in the process of linguistic decategorization, will also be discussed inorder to show how decategorization helps to slove the paradox between the infinity ofphysical things and the limitedness of linguistic terms in expressions.After being first proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1984), decategorizationhas been regarded as a mechanism of grammaticalization for a very long time. In LiuZhengguang’s studies, decategorization is no longer a mere mode ofgrammaticalization, it has been promoted to a cognitive mechanism, which has thesame theoretical significance as categorization in the field of linguistic studies. Itscontribution to explanations of "irregular" constructions on the lexical level has alsobeen carefully discussed by linguists like Taylor (2001), Hopper&Thompson (2005)etc.. And this is the direct trigger for our tentative efforts to use decategorization toanalyze "irregular" or atypical new examples in lexical categories as well as that insyntactic constructions appeared in daily language usage."Irregular" examples of VO+O like "给力" and ADV+N like"很黄很暴力", andsyntactic constructions like tautologies, middle constructions and atypical passiveconstructions BEI+XX in both Chinese and English are nowadays widespread.Though insightful linguists have already done plenty of researches to study theselinguistic phenomena from different perspectives, the cognitive motivations behind them have not been touched upon yet. The thesis will focus on these widespreadconstructions and approach them from the perspective of decategorization, hopingthat a new angle of research on "irregular" and new constructions in both lexical andsyntactic categories can be achieved. Moreover, this thesis also aims at addressing theparadox between infinite and continuously-emerged physical things and finitelinguistic expressions, to explore the magic of decategorization, which is created bythe realization of semantic extensions and innovations of old linguistic terms.