A Cognitive Comparative Analysis Of Grammatical Hierarchies Of Objects In English And Chinese Simple Clauses

A simple clause is a grammatical unit that exists in both English and Chinese,which constitutes a basic linguistic unit connecting phrases and sentences.The morpho-syntactic feature of the simple clauses can be marked as[NP V NP]or[V NP].Objects in English and Chinese have always been the focus of the research as they feature varied forms,complex meanings and diversified relationships with predicates.Among the previous studies on objects,fruitful results have been achieved with regard to their grammatical status,semantic types,and morpho-syntactic characteristics and typological values.However,there still exists much space for the studies that target the English and Chinese simple clause structures with the mono-morpheme verbs,particularly in terms of their grammatical hierarchies.Therefore,English and Chinese simple clauses with simple verbs as the center are selected as major research target in an attempt to conduct a research that incorporates relevant theories in cognitive semantics with English and Chinese data.The analysis specially focuses on the grammatical hierarchies of objects and the cognitive motivation for their types and distributions so as to account for the similarities and differences in the thinking between English and Chinese languages.Both qualitative and corpus-based quantitative methods are adopted in this research to account for the grammatical hierarchies of objects in English and Chinese simple clauses while the prototype theory of categorization,along with the force dynamic causal theory,is employed to analyze the cognitive tendencies and characteristics.The major research questions in the thesis include:(1)What are grammatical hierarchies and distributions in the English and Chinese simple clauses?(2)What are the similarities and differences of the objects in English and Chinese simple clauses as well as the cognitive motivation behind them?With English and Chinese mono-morpheme verbs as retrieval item(with v.as search type),1 0%linguistic data,which structurally conform to the morpho-syntactic structure of[NP V NP]or[V NP],are randomly selected out of BLCU(Beijing Language and Culture University)Corpus Center(BCC).Eventually 4,046 qualified English simple clauses and 1,597 Chinese ones are retrieved as the research data.The research shows that:(1)Grammatical hierarchies of objects in English and Chinese simple clauses all assume diversified features,and their distributions cover multiple types of typical object and non-typical ones.(2)When there appear apparent similarities of grammatical hierarchy of certain types of objects in English and Chinese,other types of objects,however,assume different tendencies,showing a feature of unique unbalance.The thesis indicates that grammatical hierarchies of objects in two languages assume noticeably a prototypical feature,among which the patient objects with the highest frequency are most likely the patient prototype members,while other objects have maintained fuzzy boundaries in relation to the prototype,displaying a certain degree of relation in the family resemblance.In addition,the motivations behind the diversities of objects in English and Chinese simple clauses are originated from cognitive construal in the aspectual and causal structure,which indicates the similarities of thinking pattern between English and Chinese in encoding an event structure.However,different orientations or angles adopted by English and Chinese nations can also result in sharp contrast in encoding a specific event due to the differences in their social life and manners,etc.,thus reflecting the differences in specific usage events in the process of language use.While targeting the English and Chinese simple clauses with mono-morpheme verbs,this thesis attempts to reveal the grammatical hierarchies and distributions of objects in them and elaborate their similarities and differences from the perspective of cognitive semantics.On the one hand,it is beneficiary to enhance the understanding and proper use of basic grammatical unit as the simple clause.On the other hand,it strengthens the typological studies that focus on language similarities.However,due to the inadequacies and deficiencies in data collection and theoretical analyses,the investigation into argument realization of objects in simple clauses and their semantic relationships with verbs is still far from adequate,thus pending for the further in-depth exploration.