A Corpus-based Exploration Into The Prototype Category Of Word Classes In English And Chinese

Previous studies on word classes,while focusing on nouns,verbs,and adjectives,are still insufficient for their systematicity and comprehensiveness.Furthermore,the scientifically rigorous quantitative verification has been inadequately taken into account,without thorough typological explorations.Therefore,adhering to the usage-based principle of cognitive linguistics,this thesis aims to investigate the characteristics of English and Chinese word classes through the observation of high-frequency words for enrichment of word-class research from the cognitive typological perspective.A scientific random sampling method is adopted to extract English and Chinese high-frequency words from the high-frequency word lists compiled from COCA and CNC.With reference to authoritative dictionaries,the qualified high-frequency ones are thoroughly investigated to explore their word-class distributions and cognitive characteristics,along with the cognitive mechanisms and motivations behind their similarities and differences.It is found that the English and Chinese open classes,compared to the closed classes,dominate the frequency distribution,being typical members of word classes,with nouns topping the distribution tendencies in both languages.Embodied cognitive representations of word classes also show trends of commonality,from concrete to abstract,from being closely related to people to being indirectly related to people,and from space to time.In addition,words with multiple word-class memberships are abundant in word classes,displaying hierarchical relations with different degrees of membership.Furthermore,it is revealed that word classes in two languages share a similar prototypical effect,i.e.,the prototypical nouns with high specificity and productivity gradually expand to adjectives/verbs,adverbs,and other closed classes,forming a prototypical-marginal continuum.But English adjectives and exclamations enjoy higher statuses than Chinese ones,leading to slight differences in their respective word-class categories.Typologically,differences and similarities in English and Chinese word-class prototypicality are ascribed to their common evolution as isolating languages,their distinct mighty categories,and their different spatio-temporal preferences.Specifically,words without morphological changes are common both in English and Chinese and are more inclined to experience semantic extensions into other grammatical categories with multiple word-class memberships.As with the obvious distinctions in the distributions of verbs and adjectives in English and Chinese,Chinese verbs enjoy the mightier prominence in contrast with English verbs,while English adjectives acquire more prominent inventory-typology features in contrast with Chinese adjectives.Although spatiality is among the basic commonalities of human cognition,the diachronic extension of nouns to verbs demonstrates that the English nation is less stable in spatial thinking than the Chinese one,tending to deviate from spatiality towards temporality.Last but not least,the word-class prototypicality and extension are driven by conceptual metonymy and metaphor as well as grammaticalization,fundamentally motivated by the economy principle of language.In sum,the exploration of English and Chinese word classes exposes more cognitive similarities than differences between the two peoples.Differences essentially stem from their distinct construal preferences as well as their socio-cultural backgrounds,while more similarities between the two categories reflect the commonality of people’s conceptualization models.The prototypical categories presented by English and Chinese word-class categories have a corresponding value for typological research and may also shed light on foreign language teaching and translation.