Comparative Analysis Of The Generative Mechanism Of English And Chinese Cognate Structure Under The Framework Of Distributed Morphology

There is a special language phenomenon in English, where some intransitive verbs take their objects that are cognate with the verbs lexically or semantically, such as live a happy life and die a peaceful death. These structures are called cognate structures, and these objects are called cognate objects in grammar. In contrast, Chinese cognate structures, such as hua hua, shu shu and ding ding, are not recognized or studied by linguists,Many domestic and foreign scholars have studied cognate structure from various angles, such as syntactic and semantic aspects, but these studies rarely examined the generative mechanism of cognate structure. Most of this research examines the syntax status of the English cognate object, but lack a deep study of its structure. Therefore, this article analyzes the generative mechanism of English and Chinese cognate structure using the theoretical framework of the Distributed Morphology (DM).This paper first makes a detailed representation of the theoretical framework about Distributed Morphology, which is mainly its characteristics and syntactic operations; then examines the structural relationship of cognate object structure and the semantic properties of English and Chinese cognate structure; finally, under the framework of DM, the author analyzes the generative mechanism of two languages from the morphological and syntactic levels.The author suggests the following conclusions from the analysis of the generative mechanism:First, from the process of their derivations, in English and Chinese, all the nouns are root-based words, and the verbs in Chinese are word-based, while the verbs in English cognate structure are root-based words. Second, the verbs both in English and in Chinese have the feature of transitivity, which is the result of combining with the functional morpheme TRANS and English and Chinese both form verbal phrases, but the degree of transitivity of verbs in Chinese cognate structure is higher than in English. Third, to some degree, there exists a corresponding relationship between English and Chinese cognate structure. Finally, when the roots combine with different functional morphemes, the change will happen in the morphological formation in English, while the suprasegmental changes in Chinese.This paper has explained the question that cannot be explained in the traditional grammar in the framework of DM, that is, an intransitive verb can add a cognate object as its object. And we find that the English cognate structure is a temporary structure, and the verbs possess the feature of transitivity. However, the degree of transitivity of verbs in Chinese cognate structure is higher than in English. This article is an attempt to analyze and compare cognate structure in English and Chinese from the theory of DM, whose purpose is to help the readers understand the particularity of this language phenomenon from the perspective of contrastive analysis. The author hopes that through the study of this article, it can also play a great role in promoting English teaching and related research.