A Cognitive Semantic Study On English Phrasal Verbs

Composed of a verb and one or two particles following the verb, phrasal verb (PV) is an important kind of vocabulary in English. On the view of traditional linguistics, the meaning of PVs has the feature of opaqueness, in other words, its meaning is not the simple combination of the meaning of the verb and the particle, phrasal verb is a main obstacle for EFL learners to acquire the native-like idiomatic English. Different from the traditional linguistics which holds that the various meanings of a phrasal verb are isolated in each other, the cognitive linguistics considers that the meaning of the PV is motivated and analyzable. Cognitive semantics holds that the various meanings of the PVs show prototype effect, with the prototypical meaning in the central position. On the basis of the prototypical meaning, other additional meanings can be extended by using different ways of construal and metaphorical extension. Most studies on the semantics of the PVs only focus on the cognitive semantic study of the particles, neglecting the influences of the verbs or particles on the meaning of the PVs. Thus on the basis of a cognitive semantic study of the particle and PVs this study aims to investigate the influences of the verbs and particles on the meaning of PVs.Both the quantitative method and the qualitative method are adopted in this study. Taking the particle out as an example, top 200 PVs containing the particle out are extracted from the corpus according to the frequency. Some qualitative analysis on the cognitive semantic of the particle out and PVs with out are made first by using the construal theory and conceptual metaphor theory. Then the number of the meanings of the PVs is counted according to the dictionary and the corresponding frequency is computed accordingly. Furthermore, the relationship between the number of the meanings and the frequency of verbs is concluded by inquiring the frequency list of the verb. Finally, the influences of the particle on the meanings of the PVs are discussed by comparing the meaning clusters of the particle out and that of the PVs containing out.It is found that:(1) the meanings of the particle out and PVs with out all represent the container image schema, representing the prototypical meaning "be away from or leave a place". Four meaning clusters for the particle out and three meaning clusters for the PVs with out are deduced on the basis of prototypical meaning. Most of the meanings of PVs are non-spatial, among which the meaning cluster "final exclusion of a dynamic process" is in the majority. (2) The frequency of verbs can influence the number of meaning of PVs. The PVs composed of higher frequent verbs have relatively more meanings while PVs composed of lower frequent verbs have relatively fewer meanings. PVs with many meanings (for example more than nine) are in the minority (5%), while PVs with fewer meanings (for example one to two) are in the majority (67%). (3) The meaning of PVs can be influenced by the particle from different aspects, such as result, tendency, degree, source, state, range etc, among which the aspect of result influences the most. (4) The lower frequent the verbs are, the less influences of the particle on the meaning of PVs. And the influences concentrate on the aspect of result. Contrastively, the higher frequent the verbs are, the more influences of the particle on the meaning of PVs. And the influences scatter over more aspects.It is expected that the semantic study on the PVs with the particle out from the perspective of cognitive linguistics can be helpful to the EFL teaching, textbook writing and lexicography and other fields.