A Study On Cognitive Features Of English Negative Polarity Items

NPIs,especially their emergence and operating mechanism,have fascinated linguists for long years.The related studies and research at times spring up,bringing freshness to and revelation on this mysterious land of NPIs.Previous studies on this topic are mostly undertaken within the domain of formal(generative)linguistics.They mainly investigate NPIs' licensing conditions and their syntactical distributions from the perspective of semantics,syntax,pragmatic model,and cognitive model,and bring about fruitful achievements yet leave major problems unsolved,which to a large extent sheds enlightenment and gives the research directions for the coming studies.Taking the remaining problems into consideration,a large amount of literatures are reviewed,including fresh ideas and achievements of recent years on negative structures under the frame of cognitive linguistics,and a conclusion can be arrived at that studies on NPIs from the perspective of cognitive linguistics are less than expected,and inland relevant studies are mostly summarizations on the overseas research achievements.Therefore,this thesis collects English NPIs of high frequency,and investigates them with the help of Cognitive linguistics,aiming to explain the cognitive features of NPIs in a more comprehensive way.Correspondingly,this thesis tries to answer these two questions :(1)Why are NPIs only allowed in negative context? What is the relationship between NPIs and negative context?(2)What are the cognitive motives for NPIs?Analysis and investigation lead to the following conclusions: NPIs emergence as the cognitive extension on time and space on the basis of Embodiment.It is the result of elevation of construal ability and enrichment of cognitive context.Besides,NPIs,most of them being adverbs or irregular structures,are marked,thus reversing the figures and grounds in the sentential expressions and pushing the verb+NOT to the position of figure.for the purpose of emphasizing the negation.What's more,the more typical the words to be NPIs,the more restrictedly they are bounded with negative context,while those peripheral members are freer from restrictions and can get throughnegative and affirmative context respectively.Therefore,this thesis,based on the degree of dependency of different NPIs to the negative context,classifies the NPIs around the prototypes.