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The Production Mechanism of English Cognate Object Construction

Author: JuRuiYan
Tutor: LiuChenDan
School: Henan University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: English cognate object construction cognitive grammar cognitive features production mechanism
CLC: H314
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 34
Quote: 0
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Abstract


In English, there exists a very special linguistic phenomenon, in which some intransitive verbs can take as objects some nouns which are morphologically related and semantically similar to them. Such structure is referred to as the cognate object construction (COC) in English grammar, and it is exemplified by the following sentences:(1) Bill sweats hard-earned sweat during the football game. (COCA)(2) The teacher laughed many ridiculous laughs for kids. (COCA)Numerous scholars at home and abroad have made a careful study of the syntactic and semantic features of the COC from various perspectives. However, few scholars have touched upon its production mechanism. The present study, thereupon, attempts to make a tentative exploration of the production mechanism of the COC from the perspective of Langacker’s cognitive grammar.Based on the careful analysis of the real-life data extracted from the COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English), the present thesis first sums up the unique cognitive features of the COC, which include attributiveness, dependence, prominence, abstractness and uniqueness. Meanwhile, the application value of these cognitive features is also discussed in greater detail. This study can help us to delimit the COC and further clarify our research object.In accordance with above observation, the present paper points out that cognate object (CO) can be construed as either the event or the final state of the event specified by the verbal process, depending on speakers’conceptualization. The eventive CO profiles a bounded entity composed of the component states of the process through the cognitive processing activities of summary scanning and a shift in profile. The resultant CO is captured through re-shifting the profile from the bounded event to the final state of the process. They stand in a part-whole or metonymic relationship.Then, the present thesis analyzes the conceptual content of the intransitive verbs used in the COC, pointing out that originally they can only profile one schematic substructure, i.e., the trajector, which can only be elaborated by the profile of the subject. They cannot provide a landmark. However, motivated by the causal relationship between the intransitive verbs and their corresponding COs, these intransitive verbs are categorized by the monotransitive construction with a“cause-existence”meaning, and thereby they can be apprehended as verbs of“cause-existence”. The result is that they can provide a landmark, which is elaborated by the profile of CO. In this way, the present thesis eventually comes up with the production mechanism of the COC. With repeated use, these intransitive verbs will be endowed with an extended meaning, which subsumes the content of both the construction and themselves.This paper has made a tentative study of the production mechanism of the COC in English from the perspective of cognitive grammar. No doubt, it has yielded many fruitful results, but unavoidably it also has many limitations. The last chapter will discuss the findings and limitations of the present research, and at the same time, suggest some possible perspectives for future study.

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CLC: > Language, writing > FOREIGN > English > Grammar
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