A Cognitive Study On Chinese Atypical Verb-object Structure "chi+N"

The diversity of semantic relationship between Chinese verb and its object isremarkable in Chinese grammar study because the relationship between verbs andobjects in Chinese is so complicated and difficult to distinguish. The lack of marknessadds the difficulty and complexity to identify the semantic verb-object relationship inChinese.The verb “chi” is a frequently used word in modern Chinese and the “chi+N”(means “eat+N”) phrase can be regarded as the miniature of various Chinese VOstructures. Lots of scholars analyzed “chi+N” structure from the perspectives ofpragmatics, syntax etc. but a reasonable explanation has not come out yet.In order to avoid the fuzziness of the research object, this thesis first makes aclassification of typical “chi+N” phrase and untypical “chi+N” phrase and put thefocus on the latter one. Then, the thesis reflects, sorts out the previous studies andconcludes the limitedness and unsolved problems of the previous studies. Based on theprevious studies, this thesis aims to find out their limitations and tries to give acomprehensive explanation on the semantic relationship and the forming mechanismuntypical “chi+N” structure by using cognitive linguistics theories like CognitiveDomain, ICM, Co-occurrence Selection, and Metonymy etc. as the theoreticalrationale.This thesis holds to the principle that language and cognition are combined andthe result of the thesis testifies that meaning is constructed instead of being objectivelygiven. Meanwhile, this thesis is helpful to machine translation and the teaching ofChinese as a foreign language which is based on sentence pattern.