Construction Of Cognitive Links And Definition Patterns Of Phrasal Verbs With UP And DOWN

Phrasal verbs (PVs) have been a nuisance in language acquisition of English, dueto their certain idiomaticity, abundance, uncertainty, and peculiarity in Germaniclanguages. A wealth of non-native learners of English is blocked in using phrasalverbs frequently or correctly. They show varying degrees of avoidance in use. Thisstudy is conducted to reduce the degree of avoidance from a cognitive perspective,benefiting the acquisition of PVs and optimizing the representation of PVs indictionaries.Particles have a significant influence on the syntactic and semantic structure ofPVs. A study on the semantic contribution of particles to PVs is of great importance.With up and down being the cases,10most frequent up-and down-PVs are selectedfrom the corpus, each with100concordance lines as the research samples. Eachphrasal verb (PV) is given a semantic categorization, and the semantic contribution ofup and down to these PVs is abstracted from the integrated meaning through thetheory of conceptual integration. The image schema and metaphor theory are adoptedto analyze the formation of that semantic contribution, and divide them into differenttypes according to their representation in different schemas with different salience.PVs with the same particle turn out to relate to each other for the semanticcontribution of the particle. A comparison between the up-and down-PVs revealstheir semantic connection, either similar or opposite. The opposite ones are morefrequent for sure.More attention is paid to the semantic explanation in definitions of PVs incurrent dictionaries. The construction and semantic components, though significant tothe acquisition of PVs, are not popular in definitions. An alternative definition patteris built based on the cognitive grammar, multidimensional definition theory andcognitive grammar, with prominent representation of constructions and semanticcontribution of the particle. A tight connection between the form and meaning isbeneficial to the acquisition of PVs.