A CCA-Based Study Of Existential There-Construction In Political Discourse

Construction is not only pairing of form-meaning and form-function,but also language unit with full meanings.Cognitive-based construction grammar is the main theoretical basis of the current researches on constructions.There-construction has become a typical construction in cognitive research because of its stable syntactic structure and distinct semantic features.According to the semantic meaning of “there”,Lakoff divides the construction into deictic there-construction and existential there-construction.And the latter has characteristic of guiding speaker's intention in discourse.Thanks to its construction meaning,the existential there-construction not only highlights the meaning of existence and objectivity at syntactic level,but also conveys speaker/writer's viewpoints and attitudes by one's selection of head verbs and noun phrases at the lexical level.In scientific and political discourse,the existential there-construction is widely used to state one's viewpoint and reach agreement,etc.Previous studies on the construction mainly focus on the motivation of its formation,its semantic features and pragmatic functions,and few on cognitive studies of its features and functions in a specific discourse.Due to these above,this thesis takes the existential there-construction in political discourse as the research object and analyzes its linguistic and cognitive features on the theoretical basis of Goldberg's construction grammar.Then follows the detailed and specific study of how existential there-constructions realize the conceptual frame and cognitive proximization in political discourse based on critical cognitive analysis(CCA for short).CCA is a new trend of discourse analysis developed from critical discourse analysis(CDA for short).It takes cognitive factors as an important component in the study of discourse and social relations,and aims to analyze the political viewpoints and intentions in political discourse.As relatively mature and representative theoretical basis of CCA,the theory of framing and proximization could support the study of existential there-construction in political discourse.This thesis mainly adopts qualitative and quantitative research methods.As a supplement of qualitative study,a corpus study is adopted to find the variant types and frequency of head verbs in existential there-construction,and to provide proof and evidence for further study of constructions in terms of its features and functions in the political discourse.This study consists of two parts.One is to study,in general discourse,head verbs' types and frequency of the construction based on the statistics of COCA.And the top 12 verbs are selected based on their frequency.The other is to build a corpus of political discourse based on the speeches from American presidents in the last 100 years.Antconc is adopted to conduct the statistical analysis of head verbs in terms of their types and frequency in the construction.The top 6 verbs are selected based on their frequency and are compared with the verbs in general discourse.It is found that dynamic verbs as well as static verbs are frequently used in existential there-construction owing to the construction coercion.“Be” and “come” are the most frequently used verbs in the two kind of verbs respectively.As representative of static verbs,“be” tends to be used in a sentence with present tense while “come”,the representative of dynamic verbs,tends to be with the past tense.Although dynamic verb “go” has high frequency in COCA,it has pretty low frequency in political discourse.Supported by Goldberg's construction grammar and critical cognitive analysis,qualitative study puts more emphasis on features and cognitive functions of existential there-construction respectively.First,the theoretical study has proved that the features of existential there-construction are embodied in its linguistic structure and function.That is,the word order in the construction is relatively fixed;nominal phrase in it,as enhanced theme,can highlight the entity or thing represented by nominal phrase;moreover,the construction has introducing,developing and summing-up functions respectively in a discourse.From the perspective of cognition,the features of this construction include salient nominal phrase,cognitive reference feature and metaphoric feature.Second,the CCA-based study of existential there-construction proposes that the construction is conducive to make speaker' s intentions and viewpoints convincing and acceptable in a political discourse.It has proved that both linguistic and cognitive features of existential there-construction are conducive to the activation of the frame and attainment of cognitive proximization,so as to realize the its cognitive function of guiding discourse intention in political discourse.