A Cognitive Approach To The Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Psychological Causative Verbs

Psychological causative verbs are common both in English and Chinese,which have attracted many linguists' attention both at home and abroad for their speciality in semantics and syntax,and their close relation with speakers' emotional state.This thesis will compare English and Chinese psychological causative verbs from the perspective of morphology and syntax,based on real examples selected from corpus under the instruction of Figure and Ground theory,with an aim to identify some differences and similarities.After reviewing previous English and Chinese studies about psychological causative verbs,the paper will analyze and compare them from morphology and syntax in the body part,chapter four.In the aspect of morphology,generally there are three ways of psychological causative verb word formation,which are causative lexicalization,identical shift and resultative compounds.Through searching real examples from online corpus,COCA and CCL,the author finds that psychological causative verbs in English are mainly formed by causative lexicalization,identical shift,no place for resultative compounds.On the contrary,psychological causative verbs in Chinese are mostly formed by identical shift and resultative compounds,while causative lexicalization is absent.Based on this finding,the author tries to explain it in Figure and Ground theory.The author believes in the word formation of Chinese and English psychological causative verbs,especially during causative lexicalization in English and resultative compounds in Chinese,Figure and Ground is commonly found.Besides,in these two aspects,root morpheme is Figure,affix is Ground,in other words,the part causing mental change is Ground,while showing mental state part is Figure.Because in this kind of words,root morpheme is the decisive factor,restricting their meanings,suitable for people's recognition.Next the thesis focuses on syntax,the choice of subject and object is taken into first consideration when researching English and Chinese psychological causative verbs.About this aspect,English and Chinese psychological causative verbs basically are the same,the author believes in the sentence of psychological causative verbs,subject can be doer of causative action,it can also be the main reason leading to object's emotional change.Object is real initiator of behavior,which is the premises that psychological causative verbscan be used in the particular situation.Hence,object is for subject,showing the result,and most objects are human being.On the other hand,syntactic structures are paid much more attention in this thesis.After analysis,the author concludes that usual syntactic structure for Chinese psychological causative verbs are NP1+VP+NP2,NP2+?+VP and some variants:"?"and "?"structure,unique to Chinese.While in English psychological causative verbs,common syntactic structures are NP1+VP+NP2,NP1+VP+P+NP2 and NP2+VP.NP1+VP+NP2 structure is shared both by English and Chinese.This paper tries to employ main linguistic theory in Tamly's Figure and Ground theory:sequence principle,temporal principle and contingency,to analyze this structure.As there is inner logical cause and effect relation in psychological causative verbs,combined with Figure and Ground theory,it is not difficult to conclude that NPi is Ground and NP2 is Figure.After analyzing psychological causative verbs from morphology and syntax,it is safe to say in using English and Chinese psychological causative verbs differences overweigh similarities.This is because psychological causative verbs are closely related with speakers' subjectivity,cognitive methods and national thinking habits.First at morphological level,more attention is paid to causative lexicalization in English while Chinese focuses more on periphrastic causative construction.Then at syntactic level,there are more syntactic patterns in Chinese in addition to periphrastic causative construction and NP1+VP+NP2,whaich are shared by both languages.