A Cognitive Study On The Metaphorical Extension Of There-be Construction

An existential sentence is a universal linguistic phenomenon in all the languages of the world.From a grammatical point of view,an existential sentence is also a special and complicated sentence.Coupled with the limitations of its semantic and pragmatic nature,the existential sentence has attracted the interest of many linguists.And there are many achievements in these areas.The syntactic study of English existential sentences has always been the focus of academic circles.The most common structure of existential sentence is: There+be+NP+locative expression(+temporal expression),which indicates that someone or something exists somewhere(or sometime).Descriptive linguistics,generative linguistics and functional linguistics have conducted deep researches on English existential sentence.Based on a large number of previous scholars' researches,this thesis studies English existential sentence as a construction,places it under the framework of construction grammar and adopts relevant theories of cognitive linguistics,such as conceptual metaphor and image schema,etc.,to reveal metaphorical motivation and mechanism of there-be construction extension.Regarding the research on the motivation of the metaphorical extension of there-be construction,this thesis mainly studies it from three aspects: The first aspect is based on experiential cognition,a conceptual structure comes from human body experience,there-be construction is no exception.People can not only experience its basic meaning but also its metaphorical meanings;the second aspect is based on ontological metaphor.Cognitive subjects can construe non-physical entities without clear boundaries as specific physical entities under the control of imaginative thinking.The main driving force behind them is ontological metaphor;the third aspect is about construction hierarchy and interaction.In the category of there-be construction,its prototype construction and the constructions of its metaphorical extension are cognitively related,at the same time,their structures and semantics are similar..Prototype construction and the constructions of its metaphorical extension are instance constructions of there-be schematic construction.The existence of schematic construction and prototype construction provides a cognitive schema and examplar for the output and understanding of there-be metaphorical construction..The formation of metaphorical extension constructions is the result of the interaction of various factors.In there-be construction,it is mainly about the interaction between the construction and the existents and the interaction between the existents and its existential spaces.The research on the working mechanism of metaphorical extension of there-be construction is mainly reflected from the aspects of category mapping,analogy mechanism,and cognitive context dependence.The category mapping is mainly reflected in two aspects,one is the mapping between the existents,the specific existent,which is regarded as source domain,can be mapped onto the abstract existent,which is regarded as target domain.The other is the mapping between the existential spaces,the specific existential space,which is regarded as source domain,is projected into the abstract spaces,which are regarded as target domain;Analogy can be as a cognitive mechanism,one concept can be transformed into another concept through analogy,in there-be construction,the concepts of the specific existent and existential space can be converted into concepts of abstract existents and existential spaces by analogy,which provides a cognitive basis for the expressions of the metaphorical meanings of there-be construction;meanwhile,the metaphorical meanings of there-be construction also depends on their existing cognitive contexts,which mainly include cultural context,encyclopedic knowledge and situational context.The study finds that there-be construction has a basic meaning,but its meaning system can be extended by metaphorical means.The extension of there-be constructional meaning system firstly results from the metaphorical cognitive activities of human beings;at the same time,this extension is realized because of various specific components in the construction.Among them,existents play a very important role in promoting the extension of there-be constructional meaning system.