A Cognitive Grounding Approach To The Head Of English Nominals

This dissertation is devoted to studying the head of English nominals from the perspective of Cognitive Grounding. Noun, as a basic element of the grammatical structure, is a conceptual basis for our construal of the world and a carrier of linguistic meanings. The related studies on English nominals are a core component in grammar researches, of which the head of English nominals has always been one focus.According to the traditional approach and the systemic functional approach, noun is identified as the head of a nominal. Traditional approach does not take the mental conception of head into consideration. Systemic functional approach studies the head from the perspective of function and meaning, but the mental conception of functional words like determiner do not receive sufficient attention. The DP hypothesis in generative grammar has solved some of the puzzles of the traditional approaches to the head of English nominals, but takes less attention to the meaning and mental conception of the head. Cognitive Grammar describes the head of English nominals from a new perspective, taking the form, meaning, function and mental experience into consideration.In the aspect of the Grounding Theory, the head is the determinant element that gives the nominal its semantic character or its grounding properties. That is, in the construction XY, X is the head if the profile of XY is inherited from that of X. Although Cognitive Grammar has removed many doubts of previous studies on the head of English nominals, it still needs further elaborations on the principle of head identification in general, and on head identification of such specific structures as plurality,"determiner+noun","quantifier+noun" and "the+noun". As an attempt to solve the questions listed above, this dissertation tries to provide a generalized principle for head identification of English nominals, use the principle to figure out the head of some typical nominal structures, and finally apply the principles to some specific cases in an effort to prove the justice of the principle. The present dissertation adopts a qualitative method, seeing description and explanation of equal importance. Data are mainly collected from the literature of English grammar by observation and some are obtained by introspection. It is found that (i) English nominals are headed by the grounding elements including determiners, relative quantifiers and affixes;(ii) that the head helps the bare noun to become a grounded nominal and then set the mental relation between the participants and the cognitive context; and (iii) that the agreement between subject and verb is determined by both the head and the mental meaning of the grounded nominal.