A Cognitive Approach To The Contrastive Study Of Argument Alternation Between Chinese And English

There exists a special syntactic phenomenon in which,though the subject and the object are alternated,the derived sentence is still grammatically and semantically acceptable,with its propositional meaning basically unchanged.It is known as“subject-object exchanging sentence” or “reversible sentence” in modern Chinese and belongs to the process of “argument alternation”,which also has its counterpart in English,such as “agent/patient argument” alternation and “locative-argument”alternation.Traditional linguistic research concentrates merely on the verbal meaning while classifying the argument alternation phenomenon,and yet it is undeniable that the same verb may often appear in multiple syntactic structures due to its functional flexibility,which challenges the traditional approach to classification.Furthermore,Chinese and English,belonging to different language families,often syntactically demonstrates both similarities and differences,which cannot be reduced to simple correspondence to or complete difference from each other,so argument alternation poses a challenge to the instruction of both English and Chinese as a foreign language.This study aims to search for a feasible classification method applicable to both Chinese and English argument alternation,to further and better describe the similarities and differences between English and Chinese argument alternation,reveal the factors underlying their formation,and provide reference for intercultural communication.This research takes the direct argument alternation,in which the arguments before and after the predicate alternate their position,as the object of the study.The data is selected from the existing research literature as well as the corpus BNC and the Peking University corpus CCL,while the derived sentences from argument alternation are determined by the relationship between the thematic hierarchy and the syntactic position.Based on Goldberg’s(1995)Construction Grammar theory,various constructions are established,in accordance with the features of the derived sentences,for further differentiating types of argument alternation.The Figure-Ground theory also provides a new theoretical perspective to reveal the motivation and formation mechanism behind this syntactic phenomenon.In a nutshell,the cognitive approach overcomes the problem of over-reliance on the semantics of the predicate verbs,and further optimizes the classification of Chinese and English argument alternation.These constructions involve two levels.The first level establishes a total of four major constructions for Chinese,namely the Reciprocal Alternation,the Locative Alternation,the Causer and Becoming Alternation,and the Distributee and Sharing Alternation;and a total of two for English,which are the Reciprocal Alternation and the Locative Alternation.On the second level,the Reciprocal Alternation and the Locative alternation are divided into three sub-constructions respectively for Chinese while two respectively for English.Based on the construction classification,this study has found that argument alternation process conforms to the Figure-Ground reversal at the cognitive level,i.e.,the perspectival shift and the corresponding focal prominence.While argument alternation does not cause propositionally fundamental semantic change,subtle and delicate semantic differences do occur between the original and the derived sentences in terms of cognition.The comparison of argument alternation between Chinese and English facilitates the understanding of special syntactic phenomena and contributes to both Chinese and English instruction and acquisition as a second/foreign language.