Subjectification And Modality In The Construal Of DIFFICULTY

DIFFICULTY is an abstract cognitive concept and is peculiar in construal.The construal of DIFFICULTY gives emphasis on a profiled process in which an entity is involved rather than the entity itself.At present,DIFFICULTY is mainly studied from the perspectives of traditional and cognitive grammar.The present research endeavors to investigate the construal of DIFFICULTY under the framework of cognitive grammar.Language users' application and comprehension of DIFFICULTY are essentially a construal relationship between the conceptualizer and the ground construed.But how to construe DIFFICULTY? The present study emphasizes on two research questions: how subjectification works and in what way modality takes a part in the construal of DIFFICULTY.This thesis adopts COHA,selects sentences with difficult,determines their corresponding research formulae,and collects related corpus data.With regard to the first question,this study selects sentences with speaker as the only conceptualizer.These sentences are then examined in terms of syntactic features and the positional relation between the speaker and the ground.An increasing degree of subjectivity is found in the conceptualizer's construal,which proves the role of subjectification in construing DIFFICULTY.With respect to the second question,examples are chosen and re-queried in COHA to get the entire paragraph.Our analysis begins with the relation of the conceptualizer and experiencer.The force-dynamics and epistemic assessment of DIFFICULTY-expressions are investigated on the base of linguistic context.Studies show language users simultaneously express modality while construing DIFFICULTY.Furthermore,different noun categories are found to affect the functional zone of modality.The application of these entities presents a longitudinal change.The present research demonstrates the role of subjectivity and modality in the construal of DIFFICULTY,unveils how people comprehend and apply DIFFICULTY conceptually,and enhances both language users and scholars' understanding of difficult-patterns.Moreover,language change mirrors certain social and cultural factors.The finding of a dynamic change in the application of noun types contributes to further studies on DIFFICULTY in the field of sociolinguistics.