On The Transcategorization Of Perception Verb Look

Perception refers to the cognition and understanding which are originated from human’s interaction with the outside world through their sense organs, which is one of the advanced physical and mental activities that is specific to human. People describe the action, status, results of perception world with the help of perception verbs. Compared with the perception ability of hearing, smell, touch and taste, the perception ability of vision is stronger, which acquires greater amount of information, and its related non-conventional language expressions can be easily found in daily life.Under the help of the cognitive mechanisms like metaphor and metonymy, perception verbs generate new semantic categories through changing the meanings that do not belong to the semantic prototypical categories. Besides, with the coercion from the meanings of the syntactic structures or the neighboring words, the perception verb may change its parts of speech and create new function and category, which forms the phenomenon of grammatical transcategorization. The perception verb belongs to polysemy, which owns the features of transcategorization. A great many of related studies about the perception verbs at home and abroad have been made, but most of them explored from the angle of polysemy with application of the theories of conceptual metaphor, conceptual framework, sememe analysis, etc. Based on the embodied experience of human being, this thesis comprehensively analyzes the perception verb look and the cognitive motivations as well as the derivation mechanism that underlying the semantic and grammatical transcategorization with the adoption of the image schema theory and the theory of construction coercion.In this study, the semantic web (WordNet), authoritative English dictionary (The New Oxford English-Chinese Dictionary) and corpus (Contemporary American English Corpus) and other research tools are utilized for collecting and sorting out transcategorical meanings of look. On the basis of introspective method and corpus linguistics method, this thesis offers a cognitive interpretation and analysis in a quantitative and qualitative way, and the specific steps are introduced as follows.With the exclusion of non-prototypical meanings of look, this thesis selects eleven kinds of meanings according to the perceptual sense, cognitive sense and non-perceptual sense. Within the semantic category, four kinds of semantic attributes of look are summarized and then the transcategorical meanings involved in these attributes are analyzed through the schematic approach, thus the underlying cognitive motivations and derivation model are discovered. As for the grammatical category, the morphologic change of the nominalization of look and its evolvement rule are discussed based on the data of corpus. Besides, they will be explored through the theory of bidirectional coercion between lexicon and construction. Through research analysis, the thesis obtains the following major results.In the aspect of semantic category, this thesis reclassifies the non-prototypical meanings of look according to its semantic attributes, they are action, relation with face, relation with direction, relation with mind respectively. Besides, the cognitive motivations of its semantic transcategorization are studied, which include PATH schema, CONTAINER schema, SIMILARITY schema and EMOTION schema. The derivation pattern can be described as "attributes of lookâ†'embodied cognitionâ†' Image Schemaâ†'linguistic expressionâ†'meaning extensionâ†'semantic categorizationâ†'semantic transcategorization". In addition, the perception verb watch also possesses some common features in this aspect, while other perception verbs still need to be studied.And in terms of grammatical category, through the analysis of look, the thesis finds that this perception verb is coerced by the construction of HAVE/TAKE/KEEP/DO+ Vn and clause, meanwhile it is also coerced by the lexicon such as prepositions, nouns and Article+Noun, which shows that the cognitive motivation in this aspect is the bidirectional coercion from related constructions and the lexicon.In a word, the study of transcategorization of perception verb look is concerned about the syntax-semantics interface from the cognitive perspective, which provides some academic reference value for the fields of semantic grammar, language translation. Besides, these results offer the revelation to the further study of vocabulary teaching, language acquisition, intercultural communication and other areas.