A Study Of English Compound Verbs From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Composition or compounding is universally recognized as a common effective word-building approach in English. It refers to the process in which words are built by means of joining two or more stems together. Thus a compound is a unit consisting of two or more stems. There exist many sorts of compounds in English. The number of English compound nouns takes the top place, English compound adjectives rank the second and English compound verbs occupy comparatively fewer number. However, owing to the rapid development of society and the urgent demand of communication, English compound verbs are increasingly created owing to their humorous, vivid, concise attributes. These years, fewer scholars both at home and abroad carried on some studies related to English compound verb from varieties of angles. They primarily concentrate on investigating the syntactic and semantic relation between constituents, and analyzing the modes of formation in accompany with pragmatic features of English compound verbs. These previous studies have not revealed the meaning construction process of English compound verbs. However, not all the meanings of English compound verbs are the simple sum of the meanings of the two components. The present thesis tries to explore the meaning construction mechanism for English compound verb from the perspective of Conceptual Integration Theory. For one thing, it attempts to confirm that conceptual integration is a pervasive cognitive activity with strong cognitive illustration. For another, it tries to prove that English compound verb can be explained through the Conceptual Integration Theory from the cognitive perspective in order to provide a new research perspective on the interpretation of English compound verbs.Conceptual Integration Theory proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (1998,2002), has complete theoretical framework and mature operating mechanism, in which two input spaces, one generic space and one blended space are involved in the basic operation. Elements from two inputs are selectively projected into the blended space, and then by the way of composition, completion and elaboration, emergent structure that meaning is more than the sum of its component parts appears. Many scholars have proved that this theory has great explanatory power with regard to diverse linguistic phenomena from different angles. But almost no scholar applies it into the study of meaning construction mechanism of English compound verbs. The thesis attempts to adopt the types of conceptual integration networks to construct the meaning of English compound verbs. Different semantic relations between two constituents are generalized to start with. Some examples are listed out in detail to illustrate the cognitive mechanism behind the semantic structure based on conceptual integration networks.Based on this study, it can be concluded that the meaning of some English compound verbs which display the connection of modifier and head between two components can be constructed by simplex networks; the meaning of V+V English compound verbs can be constructed by mirror networks, single space and double space networks. Exocentric English compound verbs can gain the meaning construction mechanism through multiple blending. Apart from that, this thesis proves Conceptual Integration Theory can also explain more abstract semantic integration mechanism of English compound verbs by applying the predicative structure and semantic elements which wait to be assigned the value into different input spaces.The thesis is composed of five parts. Chapter one introduces the research background, the significance, the organization of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review, including previous studies on English compounds and English compound verbs respectively at home and abroad. The third chapter introduces the theoretical ground: Conceptual Integration Theory. In particular, the four-space model, cross-space mappings, emergent structures, optimality principles and types of networks will be described. The fourth chapter is the body part of the thesis, a necessary introduction to English compound verb is about to be given, and then turn to analyze the meaning construction of English compound verbs from the integration networks. Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis, points out major findings as well as limitations of this study and provides some implications for future study.