A Cognitive Investigation Of The Verb Complement Construction In Modern Chinese Mandarin

This thesis studies the verb complement construction (VC) employing conceptual structuring of Leonard Talmy.In the previous studies, scholars decide the valency of verb complement construction by counting the valency of verb and the complement. It turns out not a very effective way.Based on conceptual structuring, the macro-event has five sub-events.They are the motion event, event of change of state, event of temporal contouring, event of action correlating and event of realization. VC in Modern Chinese Mandarin belongs with the event of change of state.VC can be rewritten in the form of the framing event and the co-event. The framing event is the core and the co-event is mainly about the manner or cause of the framing event.The conceptual structuring of the verb complement construction can be expressed by the four conceptual elements:the figure, the ground, motion and path. For example, the conceptual structuring of the sentence我喝醉了(wo_he-zui PAST TENSE.’I was drunk.’)can be written as[我(wo,’I’)MOVE INTO醉(mi,’drunk’)] framing event+[我喝�'(wo-he-jiu.’I drank wine.’)].In the above sentence,the figure is"我”,motion is expressed by MOVE, the path is INTO and the ground is“醉”.Salience rules determine valency of VC.People’s attention is not equally divided into every event piece. The framing event is more salient than the co-event. The concepts in the framing event are more salient than those in the co-event. Salient elements have the priority to show up and tend to appear independently. In an event, the same conceptual element can only appear once. All the above rules compose the basis for VC valency. All the rules are based on human’s idealized cognitive model.The valence of a VC, according to the above rules, is the number of arguments in its framing event. For nonagentive event, the valence is one and for agentive event, the valence is two.