A Cognitive Study Of Adjective-object Construction In Mandarin Based On The DMPS Model

In Mandarin, adjectives have always been surrounded by controversies because of its rich members and complicated grammatical function. It is difficult for scholars to reach an agreement on the issues of adjectives, especially the use of adjective-object construction. At present, among all the studies on adjective-object construction, scholars mainly focus on the static description on the lexical and syntactic level without the support of real linguistic data. They rarely explore the internal production mechanism of adjective-object construction from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics.Based on the core principle of “reality-cognition-language” of Cognitive Linguistics, this thesis attempts to integrate the Decategorization Theory, Metonymy, Process predication of language and Salience Principle to establish a DMPS model, with which the internal production mechanism of adjective-object construction is explained by analyzing its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features. Meanwhile, on the basis of 6th edition of The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, this thesis builds a closed corpus of 212 items of adjective-object construction by retrieving the words which are only labeled as adjectives in the corpus of modern Chinese built by the Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU and using the method of random sampling with the assistance of the standard of whether adjectives have occupied the syntactic slots of verbs.Under the framework of DMPS model, the qualitative and quantitative analysis have been given to the 212 items and the main findings are as follows:Syntactically, among the 212 items, 12 monosyllabic adjectives and 200 disyllabic adjectives can take objects and their proportions respectively are 5.6% and 94.3%. In addition, the form of adjective-object can be divided into the following four types:(1) adjective + noun;(2) adjective + modifier + noun;(3) adjective + quantifier;(4) adjective + dynamic auxiliary word + noun. Semantically, according to different thematic roles the object plays in the adjective-object construction, this thesis divides the adjective-object construction into four types:(1) adjective + patient;(2) adjective + target;(3) adjective + range;(4) adjective + proposition. The first type takes the largest proportion of 77.4%. In these four types of construction, the conceptualization of adjectives change from summary scanning to sequential scanning and language predication transforms from atemporal predication which is corresponding to adjectives to process relation which is corresponding to verbs. The speaker, in order to highlight the dynamism of status change that the adjective represents, scans a series of changing status sequentially and encodes the adjective-object construction with a metonymy of status for action. At this point, adjectives have gone through a process of decategorization. Pragmatically, the employment of adjective-object construction reflects the novelty and economy principle of language.