The Study On The Semantic Generative Mechanism Of English Compound Adjectives From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Language derives from the people's interactive experiences and cognitive processes in the real world.The application of the compounds reflects the high generality of human thoughts,the economy of the cognitive manners and the flexibility and creation of the language use.Compounding is generally considered as a common effective word-formation method in English.It is a process that the compounds are constituted by combining two or more words together.The number of English compound nouns ranks the first,English compound verbs rank the second and English compound adjectives take up fewer numbers.Over these years,fewer scholars both at home and abroad have conducted some studies related to English compound adjectives from different perspectives.Most of them focus on digging the syntactic and semantic relation between components and analyzing the ways of formation of English compound adjectives.Many previous studies have not displayed the semantic generative process of English compound adjectives.However,not all the meanings of English compound adjectives are the simple sum of the meanings of the two elements.This thesis tries to explore the meaning construction mechanism for English compound adjectives from the perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT),which has complete theoretical framework and mature operating mechanism.In one hand,it gives an attempt to convince that conceptual blending is a universal cognitive activity with strong cognitive explanation.In the other hand,it attempts to testify that the semantic generative process of the English compound adjectives can be explained through the CBT from the cognitive perspective in order to provide a new research perspective on the interpretation of English compound adjectives.Based on this study,the findings of the thesis are listed as followings:First,the application of the conceptual blending theory into the semantic contrual of English compound adjectives is a new tentative study to decode the lexical meaning of words.Second,this thesis attempts to classify and construe the semantic generative process of English compound adjectives in terms of simplex networks,mirror networks,single-scope networks,double-scope networks.Third,this thesis manages to construct the blending network modes for different types of compounds adjectives which provides an operable mechanism for the analysis of polymorphemic words.Fourth,this findings of the research can facilitate the teachers and foreign language learners in decoding the semantic network of English words.It also gives a new path for the teaching of the English compounds.The thesis is composed of five parts.Chapter one introduces the background of the study,the purpose and significance of the study,the methodology of the study,the hypothesis of the study,and the overall layout of the study.Chapter two is the literature review including previous studies on English adjectives and English compound adjectives respectively at home and abroad.The third chapter introduces the theory basis of CBT.Above all,the four-space model,cross-space mappings,emergent structures,optimality principles and types of networks will be elaborated.The fourth chapter is the body part of the thesis.Firstly,the characteristics of meaning construction of English compound adjectives will be clearly presented.Secondly,the explanation of the CBT on the process of semantic generative mechanism of English compound adjectives will be detailedly analyzed.Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis,also pointing out major findings as well as limitations of this study.