A Study Of Non-Patient Objects In Mandarin Chinese From The Perspective Of Cognitive Grammar

The paper is concerned with a cognitive study of non-patient objects in Mandarin Chinese.These constituents are characterized in contrast to patient objects which verbs typically take,including location,instrument,manner,time,cause,goal,and so on.The fact that Chinese allows non-Patient objects freely deserves an explanation.A sizeable literature has been produced to trace back to ancient Chinese,categorize semantic role of objects,and summarize the relationships between verbs and objects.But a few have probed into the nature of the seemingly abnormal structures.Among them,most fall under the formal paradigm of generative grammar,whose account of a system of rules cannot accommodate the irregular phenomenon in a convincing way.So the present study takes a radical alternative by transferring an exclusive focus on linguistic structures to a border goal: to investigate the conceptual basis that produces non-patient objects and differentiates them from non-patient objects,as well as non-patients in adverbials.From the perspective of cognitive grammar,the paper argues that such construction manifests conceptual highlighting.So all of the analyses rely on basic cognitive abilities.Even when language is not considered,such notions as focal prominence,profiling,trajector/landmark alignment,action chains,stage model and so on are firmly posited on human cognition.The very foundation of the present study is our ability to construe a situation in alternative ways,and our use of archetypes schematized from some recurring experiences to structure a clause.Having sketched the cognitive processing,the paper combines it with facts of usage.A non-patient participating in a physical or metaphorical action chain,together with its interaction with an agent,can be profiled,such as instrument,manner,result,and goal.And a spatial or temporal setting can form a container-contain relationship with an agent.These non-patients serve as the landmarks or the secondary focal elements in the profiled relationship of agents and non-patients,while patients remain part of the base.In form,non-patient objects are reminiscent of patient objects.But they are by no means the same.Patients have chain-based salience to make them the optimal landmark,whereas non-patients have to compete with them for focal prominence.They attract speakers' attention by differentiating themselves from other kinds or the one of the same kind,or invoking some senses outside of the profile like affective meanings and social meanings.Such prominence permits all acceptable non-patients and rule out the unacceptable ones.Focusing a non-patient as a landmark serves to augment its prominence in the overall situation.It suggests the centrality of the non-patient to the characterization of the event,compared with a simple medium role or peripheral role by the introduction of the adverbial.As a result,non-patient objects and non-patients in adverbials are semantically distinct rather than transformationally related.Therefore,when focal prominence is taken into consideration,non-patient objects prove less idiosyncratic than they are dealt with in previous studies.Ignoring the prominence will impoverish the rich meanings of the structures.The cognition-grounded approach facilitates an intuitively natural,psychologically plausible,and empirically sustainable explanation.The paper hopes be valuable to the understanding of non-patient objects and to a larger enterprise of studying verb-object relationships in Chinese.