A/DA: A Cognitive Study Of Garden Path Phenomenon

This thesis is a cognitive analysis of garden path phenomenon within theframework of Niu Baoyi’s revised autonomy-dependence alignment (A/D A) analyticalmodel. It focuses on the analysis of the interaction between constituents of a gardenpath sentence and the interaction between the constituent elements and the wholesentence. This thesis aims to find out the cognitive working mechanism of garden pathsentences from the perspective of cognitive grammar.In this study, garden path sentences are defined as sentences with temporarysyntactic ambiguity or local ambiguity rather than truly ambiguous sentences. Inaccordance with the framework of the revised analytical model of A/D A, the presentstudy probes into garden path sentences by examining garden path sentences caused byfive types of local ambiguity. It is argued in this paper structurally garden pathphenomenon consists of two basic elements: the dependent component and theautonomous component. The dependent component provides an E-site to be elaboratedby the autonomous component: the parser needs to recognize the elaboration on theschematic substructure profiled by the dependent component by virtue of the semanticsubstructure of the autonomous component; there exists a kind of correspondencerelationship between the semantic substructure of the autonomous component and thesemantic substructure of the dependent component; and the correspondence relationshipbetween the semantic profiles of the autonomous and dependent components enablesthe parser to combine the two into a relatively independent composite structure [DA].The meaning of the newly built composite structure inherits of the semantic profile ofits constituents. Such composite structure can be aligned with other components of agarden path sentence so as to form a greater and more complex composite structure, alarger unit, i.e., the garden path sentence. This thesis maintains that the analysis of the garden path phenomenon within theA/D A model involves the overlap of the concepts between the internal structures of theconstituents, which allows their integration to form a coherent scene (Langacker1987:278). Most garden path sentences present themselves not in a single SVO pattern,but with many clauses embedded into the main sentences. In this way, when a parserfollows the above mentioned four-step, he will often need to deal with severalacceptable composite structures in accordance with the autonomy-dependencealignment. How these composite structures can be formed and integrated into the wholegarden path sentence lies in the overlap between two conceptions so as to form acoherent scene. The correspondence between the constituents established by means ofelaboration based on their autonomous and dependent relation is the integratingmotivation of the internal elements of a garden path sentence. Its overall meaningoriginates from the process of the elaboration and alignment of the internal elements.The process of parsing and understanding a garden path sentence is a progressive andhierarchical one, from being simple to be complex.This thesis is comprised of five chapters and structured as follows.Chapter One devotes to the motivation and rationale of the present research.Chapter Two presents literature review of previous researches on garden pathphenomenon both at home and abroad. Chapter Three is mainly about the theoreticalframework of the present study, e.g., the revised A/D A model established by Niu Baoyi.Chapter Four focuses on the analysis of the garden path phenomenon within thetheoretical framework mentioned in Chapter three. Chapter Five is a conclusion to thepresent study as well as an attempt to identify the ways in which this study leads tofurther research. The noteworthy limitations are presented at the end of this chapter.