A Cognitive Study Of Collective Classifiers In English Classifier Construction

’Quantity’ is an essential way for human beings to understand and to express the world. When perceiving ’quantity’, different nations have different ways of cognition and language expressions. In English, to express the concept of number and quantity, a kind of representative construction instead of an independent word class does exist. That is "a/ number +N1+of+N2", which is named English classifier construction by scholars. In this construction, N1 is a unit word to identify the quantitative elements of N2, the modified word. N1 almost shares the same quantifying function with Chinese classifiers. N2 is the modified noun and serves as the center of the whole English classifier construction, such as ’a bunch of flowers’. Scholars name these Ni as ’Special Qualifiers,’Partitive Nouns’, or ’Unit Noun’ (Quirk,1985; Zhang Zhenbang,1989). These nouns belong to ’classifiers’, considering their semantic meanings and functions. And Scholars commonly treat ’a/an +N1+of+N2’ as English Classifier Construction (Wang Wenbin 2009; Shao Junhang 2011,2012).Studies on collective classifiers present an appreciable difference in Chinese and in English. On the whole, scholars pay more attention to collective classifiers in Chinese and their counterpart translation in English than those collective classifiers in English. Lots of scholars also make a contrastive study of collective classifiers in English and Chinese. They find that in Chinese, collective classifiers have a small number with relatively simple uses, whereas in English, the number of collective classifiers is quite large with a relatively complicated uses. At present, the study on English collective classifiers mainly concentrate on the its types, function, rhetorical features and its translation and so on. But the internal formational mechanisms does not receive enough attention, which is also the intention of the present thesis.Traditional language perspective believes that the formation of classifier construction is fixed collocation, while cognitive perspective holds the view that any language is based on experience and cognition. English classifier construction, as a unique language phenomenon, can also be interpret by cognitive linguistics. While, cognitive approach is not so widely deployed in the study of classifiers, especially the study of collective classifiers.Based on the theoretical and practical researches of previous scholars, with the cognitive theories as its theoretical framework, and the combination of quantitative approach and quantitative approach as its research methodology, this paper carries out a specific research collective classifiers in English classifier construction. Categorization, prototype theory are combined with conceptual metaphor and metonymy together to do the analysis. Classifiers of the same category would highlight some certain feature of the modified words, but they show differences in collocation competence. The categorization theory, especially the prototype theory are explored to categorize the sub-categorization of collective classifiers, and to find the basic types and grammatical features in it. Meanwhile, with the framework the author tries to find the internal collocation mechanism between the collective classifiers and the modified words. With these aims we can get a deeper understanding of collective classifiers in English classifier constructions and use this them in a more correct and local way. The present study focuses on two main issues. First, what are the collective classifiers in English classifier construction and what kind of major types do they have? Second, what is the cognitive mechanism for collective classifiers to match with the modified nouns and construct classifier construction in English? and how does the cognitive mechanism work to form the collective classifier construction?Methodologically speaking, this study is an analysis combined with qualitative and quantitive method, which is both theory driven and data driven. The data in the present thesis are taken from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). First, this thesis adopts quantitive method to present all the instances of ’a+N1+of +N2’ and Ni, the collective classifiers in the construction. The author proposed that ’collective classifier’is the classifiers to group single entities together so as to provide’a collective reference for separate entities or the abstract. The items referred to collectively can be ordered or unordered, similar or different; they can be people, animals or inanimated entities. Then, qualitative method is employed to analyzed the data. Collective classifier can be categorized into six categories with a corpus-based approach.They are ’Quantity’ Collective Classifiers,’Unit’ Collective Classifiers,’Container’ Collective Classifiers, ’Arrangement’ Collective Classifiers, ’Action’ Collective Classifiers, and’Shape’ Collective Classifiers. Within each category, main features of collective classifiers are summarized by analyzing the most relevant nouns that are modified and their collocations. Cognitive basis of collective classifier in syntactic collocation are explored through the case study. The author find that all the collocations of the collective classifiers reflect some relationship between the collective classifiers and the modified words, and proved that metaphor and metonymy are the two main mechanisms to form the collective classifier construction in English. What’s more, the two prominent construction mechanisms of conceptual metonymy in English can not work by oneself separately, but usually work interact with each other in collective classifier construction.The findings in this thesis, firstly, could give us a deeper understanding of collective classifiers as well as English classifier constructions. Secondly, the result shows that the internal forming mechanism in collective classifiers can be interpreted by cognitive linguistics, which could prove a superiority of cognitive linguistics. Thirdly, the corpus based approach to the present study, especially the collocation coming from COCA, could contribute to the method of English learning. Last but not the least, the results of this thesis could provide some inspiration to the comparison study between classifiers in Chinese and in English.While, there are also some limitations. Although the data collected from COCA is persuasive, but the total amount of collective classifier is larger than the data analysis in this study, which would certainly affect the result.