A Cognitive Construal Perspective On The Concessive Construction ‘Just Because X Doesn't Mean Y'

Cognitive Grammar manages to provide a systematic and coherent account of grammatical categories and constructions,in order to reveal the experiential and conceptual motivations for grammar.Cognitive construal is our ability to conceive and portray the same situation in different ways,which is used to describe semantic structures and grammatical categories.A cognitive construal perspective on a certain construction can explain the characteristics of conceptual organization and provide cognitive motivations for its constructional polysemy.This study takes the English concessive construction ‘Just Because X Doesn't Mean Y'(JBX-DMY)as its object,extracts instances from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),applies Simple Collostructional Analysis to the representative collexemes,and investigates the experiential and conceptual characteristics of this construction from the perspective of cognitive construal in order to explain the source and mechanism of polysemy.This study also compares JBX-DMY with the Chinese concessive sentence pattern ‘jishi X,yeshi Y'(JSYP)so as to find out the commonalities and differences of construing the concessive relation between English and Chinese.Dividing JBX-DMY into two parts,this study analyzes ways of construal,vantage points and viewing arrangement under the dimension of cognitive construal.Through statistical tests and investigations,this study has achieved the following findings:Firstly,from the outside view,the main construal way of JBX-DMY is sequential.From the inside view,it contains simultaneous construal and alternative construal.The construction allows various vantage points,but imposes restrictions on arrangements,showing the feature of partial productivity.The ‘metaphor-metonymy' mechanism is the source of the constructional polysemy for JBX-DMY.Secondly,JBX-DMY and JSPY share similar construal means,but differ in construal characteristics.From the outside view,constructions are both sequentially construed.From the inside view,the former part of JBX-DMY is static,while the latter part dynamic.On the contrary,the former part of JSPY is dynamic,while the latter part static.This study expands the research of the English concessive construction JBX-DMY.By comparing it with the Chinese concessive sentence pattern JSYP,this study proves that English and Chinese share similar construal ways but differ in construal characteristics.The research methodology and findings of the study may provide implications for similar researches.