A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Syntactic Ambiguity In English And Chinese

The syntactic ambiguity is the universal linguistic phenomenon which can be rifely seen in English and Chinese.In the past few years,the relevant comprehensive contrastive research conducted on the English syntactic ambiguity and the Chinese syntactic ambiguity have been scarecely seen and the relevant studies on English syntactic ambiguity and Chinese syntactic ambiguity from the perspective of cognition haven't drawn much attention of the foreign and domestic linguists.Therefore,this thesis is committed to conducting the cognitive contrastive study of English syntactic ambiguity and Chinese syntactic ambiguity.By adopting a comparative method and an inductive method as the main research methods,this thesis is aimed at taking the syntactic ambiguity as the main research target and conducting comprehensive elaborate contrastive analysis about the English syntactic ambiguity and Chinese syntactic ambiguity in order to ferret out the similarities and the respective differences between the English syntactic ambiguity and the Chinese syntactic ambiguity,and then explicating the English syntactic ambiguity and Chinese syntactic ambiguity from the perspective of cogniton.Moreover,the research is conducted to resolve these three research questions:1).What are the similarities between the English syntactic ambiguity and the Chinese syntactic ambiguity;2).What are the respective differences between the English syntactic ambiguity and the Chinese syntactic ambiguity;3).What are the cognitive factors of the syntactic ambiguity in English and in Chinese.By means of the comprehensive elaborate analysis,the conclusions of this thesis can be drawn as follows:(1)the similarities between the English syntactic ambiguity and the Chinese syntactic ambiguity can be summarized as:the English syntactic ambiguity and Chinese syntactic ambiguity can be both triggered by obscure mutiple modification structures,obscure semantic relations in the structure of nominalization,distinct scale of cohesion in coordinate structures,distinct functions of verbs and obscure semantic scopes and focuses of negation.(2)the differences between the English syntactic ambiguity and the Chinese syntactic ambiguity can be generalized as:the syntactic ambiguity in English can be exclusively triggered by obscure modification of post modification structures,obscure functions of post prepositional phrases and vague ellipsis in English comparative sentences.On the contrary,the Chinese syntactic ambiguity can be exclusively triggered by these two syntactic structures:one is the verb-object-complement structure,the other is the verb +noun(1)+noun(2)structure.(3)the thesis explored the cognitive factors of the English syntactic ambiguity by employing the two pairs of concepts of salience principle in cognitive grammar theory:profile/base,trajector/landmark.Moreover,this thesis has also employed the relevant theories of image schema to explicate the cognitive factors underlying the Chinese syntactic ambiguity.After the cognitive factors underlying the English syntactic ambiguity and the Chinese syntactic ambiguity were elucidated in this thesis,it successfully bore out that the linguistic phenomenon of syntactic ambiguity stems from human beings'different cognitive perceptions about things and it bears close relationship with human beings' bodily experience,cognitive means and encyclopedic knowledge.