English Compounds Meaning Study Based On Profile-Base Theory

Compounds refers to the words formed by a union of two or more elements or parts.As an important mean to create new word and express new concept,compounding is productive and widely used in daily communication.Through the ages,scholars abroad and at home have done a lot of research on compounds.Most of the scholars studied the structural feature and semantic structuring of compounds from the perspective of Structuralist Linguistics and Formalist Linguistics,they concluded that compounds are generated from underlying sentences.They hold the view that all compounds must be derived by just two syntactic process: predicate nominalization and predicate deletion.The theory has been widely accepted for quite a long period,but it has flaws since there is no way for people to systematically retrieve a unique verb.For instance,a milkman can be a man who sells? delivers? or be crazy about milk? The previous research findings are unable to account for all the compounds,people resort to another perspective to interpret.Cognitive Linguistics is a new subject whose springing up and development deepen people's cognition of language essence and language meaning.As a branch of cognitive prominence,Profile-Base theory,quoted by Langacker,introduces a new perspective to describe and explain the language.Langacker refers to the scope of a predication and its designation as base and profile.The semantic value of an expression resides in neither the base nor the profile alone,but only in their combination.Hoping to make a supplement of study on compounds,this thesis aims to analyze the semantic constructing of compounds in cognitive scope and illustrate the way to determine the profile determinant of these compounds from the perspective of Profile-Base theory together with Figure/Ground Theory,another branch of cognitive prominence.Finally,based on the Profile-Base theory,this research finds out there are two main sources of profile determinant in compounds.In the first group,the compounds inherit the profile determinant from the component noun.N+N Compounds and Adv+N Compounds belong to this group.In the second group,compounds acquire the profile determinant from the component verb and designate the trajector in the process as the profile determinant.V+N Compounds,N+V Compounds,and V+Adv Compounds belong to this group.Based on the previous analysis,this thesis selectes the N+N Compounds out and classify it into the following four groups according to their different schema: relational compound noun,property-based compound noun,conjunctive compound noun and blended compound noun.From the perspective of a static profile-base theory,figure/ground theory,this research finds out relational compounds,property-based compounds and conjunctive compounds are able to be illustrated from the perspective of figure/ground theory and the head in the compound is the profile determinant while blended compounds are able to be illustrated by figurative meaning prominence and the figurative meaning serve as the profile determinant.Therefore,compounds can not only be illustrated based on lexical formation mechanism but also be analyzed from the perspective of Profile-Base theory,which provides a cognitive way for English learners to learn and explain new words.Furthermore,it gives explanation to some unknown linguistic phenomenon and is a supplement of compounds research.