A Cognitive Study On The Information Structure Of PP + There Construction

As a common but particular language pattern in life,English existential sentences(mainly referring to there-be patterns),have drawn extensive attention of linguists.And countless studies have been done on this phenomenon.Mainly three linguistic methods contribute to the study of existential sentences,namely generative linguistics,descriptive linguistics and functional linguistics.However,as cognitive linguistics which studies cognition and language development evolves,it is found that linguistic form is not completely arbitrary,and linguistic structure reflects the concepts and conceptual structures which are formed on the basis of people's perception and cognition of the objective world,indicating that there is a necessary connection between linguistic structure and human experience.Due to the continuous deepening of people's understanding on cognitive ability,great attention has been paid to the construal of English existential sentences,and many researches have been made from the perspective of cognition.And studies on existential sentences are well-rounded and nearly cover all aspects of this linguistic structure.For the need of discourse construction and language expression,not all sentences that suggest an existential relation should use a static existential sentence pattern.Thus,a lot of new sentences transformed from existential sentences have been produced.The PP + there-construction discussed in this thesis is a typical variant of there-construction.There are three kinds of typical non-canonical word order in English,namely preposing,postposing and argument reversal.From the perspective of pragmatics,the PP + there-construction is actually a complex non-canonical structure,that is,a combination of preposing and postposing.Therefore,it complies with the functionally compositional principle,which means the constraints of its discourse function are identical with the constrains of its components.In other words,the information structure of the PP + there-construction in this study can be derived from the combination of the information structure of the preposed PP and there-construction.As mentioned above,each structure exists for some certain value and significance.Hence,based on the figure-ground theory in cognitive linguistics,this thesis sets out to study the cognitive mechanism of information structure of PP + there-construction by analyzing the information status of each component in the PP + there-construction in order to obtain its information structure.This thesis devotes to dealing with two key questions:(1)How is the information structure of PP + there-construction manifested?(2)How can the figure-ground theory be used to explain the information status of the components of PP + there-construction clearly from a cognitive view? And by doing so,it can be found that the figure-ground theory can give a reasonable explanation to the information structure of this construction and obtain its underlying intrinsic cognitive mechanism,enabling us to grasp the essence of language better,making use of this linguistic structure more flexibly and understanding the similarities and differences of linguistic structures.The following points can be made through the discussion and analysis in this thesis:(1)PP + there-construction is functionally compositional,that is to say,the constraints of its discourse function are the constraints of its components.And the PP + there-construction is a combination of the preposing and postposing of simple structures of non-canonical word order.According to the information structure theory,in PP + there-construction,the information status of PP should be discourse-old information from the perspective of the discourse and the hearer,while the information status of NP in there-construction should be discourse-new information and hearer-new information or discourse-new information and hearer-old information.Thus,the information structure of this construction can be obtained.(2)In the theory of figure-ground,figure should have some features of new information,while ground is always filled by old information.This is because the information first accepted is always given or old information and placed at the beginning of an utterance according to human's cognition.Therefore,ground occupies the position of the beginning of an utterance,and figure is in the latter part of an utterance.For PP + there-construction,Figure-ground theory can effectively explain the distribution status and arrangement mode of its components in line with these principles.In-depth study of the PP + there-construction can help people find out the grammatical features of this construction and improve their ability of language using and discourse building.In addition,this study is also conductive to understanding the complexity and productivity of syntactic structure more profoundly.Studies of PP + there-construction,a variant of there-be construction,provide new perspectives and ideas for the exploration and research of the there-be sentence pattern,so as to raise the awareness and understanding of relevant linguistic phenomena.