On The Conceptual Semantic Features Of Spatial Boundedness And Unboundedness And Their Semantic-Syntactic Interface Function In English And Chinese Motion Event Expressions

From the perspectives of Cognitive Semantics, this dissertation attempts to testify that"Spatial Boundedness", a conceptual configuration feature, plays an important Syntactic-Semantic interface function in building Motion Event constructions in English and Chinese.Taking English and Chinese MOTION EVENT sentences and some relevant grammatical phenomena as the investigation subjects, the paper argues that the agreement of [(UN) BOUNDEDNESS] feature at the sentence level can be a crucial semantic constraining principle for the syntax. The selection and collocation of lexicon at the sentence level largely reflect the semantic requirements of expressing both the conceptual content and conceptual structure of the relevant Motion Event.This research is carried out on the basis of Talmy's theory of Conceptual Event Lexicalization, the theory of Spatial Semantics Distribution and the theory of BOUNDEDNESS. By applying abduction, introspection and corpus-based test, the author makes the following four proposals:1) English and Chinese may differ in their lexicalization patterns and syntactic arrangement of lexical units in expressing MOTION EVENT and PATH element.2) The concept of PATH may be lexicalized in more diversely different construction forms than Talmy had proposed.3) As a conceptual structure property, the [Spatial (un)Boundedness] feature of the PATH schema configuration is probably semantically reflected in the closed-class linguistic units and the ways of unit allignment of a MOTION EVENT related sentence.4) The [BOUNDEDNESS] and [UNBOUNDEDNESS] features can be an important syntactic-semantic interface in building a sentence. There may exist an agreement or concord principle of"BOUNDEDNESS"in terms of the semantic constraints of a linguistic construction.The dissertation starts from the discussion of some grammatical phenomena in English and Chinese Motion Event related expressions. Then the paper explores the possible causes of these grammatical problems from the perspectives of Cognitive Semantics through abduction and introspection. By using written language data from three corpora including British National Corpus(BNC), Contemporary Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics from PKU (CCL) , and a parallel corpus of 2289 English-Chinese motion event sentences, the author observes English and Chinese MOTION EVENT sentences and PATH lexicalization patterns and their distribution in the sentences. With the description the author investigates the semantic constraints underlying the sentence structure and lexicon selection.The following major findings are made through the investigation of data and abduction.(1) The observation of the corpus shows that the lexicalization patterns of PATH concept in English and Chinese are more diversified than what Talmy has proposed. The concept of PATH is expressed by more linguistic forms than the verb roots, prepositions and particles. Other linguistic forms include constructions of particle phrases (eg. English particle phrases"up and down","here and there"), adverbial phrases(all the way, home, south) , and constructions (eg. English WAY construction, Chinese static existential construction, etc). Sometimes more than one linguistic units are used together to express a PATH concept. Verbs, prepositions, constructions are combined to produce a PATH concept. For example, in Chinese a verb may work with a preposition and a locative noun phrase to express the PATH concept together.Although both the English and Chinese languages lexicalize the PATH concept in many forms, the distribution of these PATH linguistic units at the sentential level are quite different. Two major distinctions are most impressive.1) The contrast of BOUNDEDNESS and UNBOUNDEDNESS of the PATH concept is reflected in different ways.In English, the contrast of BOUNDEDNESS feature is implied without any visible syntactic changes in sentence configuration. That is, no matter whether it is to express a bounded or unbounded PATH concept , the English Sentence Patterns are largely the same as"Verb + Preposition/ Particles+NP".In Chinese, the distinction of BOUNDEDNESS is displayed in the sentence configuration such as the order of wording. To be more specific, when expressing a boundary-free PATH concept, Chinese users employ either a"Preposition +NP+Verb"or"Preposition + NP + VAVB"construction. When a bounded PATH concept is expressed, the construction of"Verb+Directional Complement+NP"or"Verb+Preposition+NP"is employed.2) When it comes to a consecutive PATH concept expression, English and Chinese vary in their sentence constructions. The most outstanding difference lies in that in Chinese a single verb cannot take more than one Directional Complement at a time while in English a verb can take more than two particles.To be more specific, in English, a consecutive PATH concept is expressed in a pattern of"V + Prepostion1/Particle1 + Prepostion2/Particle2 + NP"or"V + Prepostion1/Particle1 + NP1 + Prepostion2/Particle2 + NP2". While in Chinese, the Directional Complements cannot be used together as English particles or prepositions do. In Chinese, to express a consecutive PATH concept, the pattern of"V1+DC1+NP1+V2+DC2+NP2"is applied.(2) A second finding of this research is that by studying the schema of the PATH concept, it is found that SPATIAL BOUNDEDNESS is a very important feature in the configuration of PATH concept. And this conceptual structural feature is lexicalized in the closed-class units of language such as closed-class lexicon and construction.As demonstrated by the corpus-based description of PATH lexicalization patterns in English and Chinese, many different classes of words and structures can express the conceptual meaning of PATH. Therefore, it is quite feasible to classify these linguistic units in terms of their SPATIAL BOUNDEDNESS feature. No matter what the conceptual content meaning is, the PATH unit can be categorized as either BOUNDED or UNBOUNDED.By testing the BOUNDEDNESS and UNBOUNDEDNESS features in these PATH elements, the researcher makes an attempted classification of English and Chinese PATH units at the level of lexicon and construction.In the process of classification, an interesting finding presented itself. The data indicates that English PATH prepositions and particles can be categorized into three categories, that is [+BOUNDED], [-BOUNDED], [+/-BOUNED]. Some of these PATH satellites lexicalize [+SPATIAL BOUNDEDNESS] feature only( eg. into, out, leave) , some lexicalize [-SPATIAL BOUNDEDNESS] feature only (eg. circle, North) and others lexicalizes both [+BOUNDED] and [-BOUNDED] features (eg. in, to) . It is the double-parameter [+/-BOUNDED] class that brings problems. People can construe different meaning from the same sentence wording with these double-parameter satellites. For example, there are two possible interpretation of the sentence of"He walked in the garden". It can mean"he walked into the garden"or"he took a walk in the garden". This is a case of dynamic construal of meaning. For those who are non-native English users, they may feel a confusion in comprehension. With the support of data observation from British National Corpus, a three-step identification strategy is proposed for non-native English users to construe the meaning of the double-parameter PATH satellites. It is argued that at the sentence level, an English particle has meaning construal possibility of either a BOUNDED or UNBOUNDED meaning. The dynamic construal of meaning of the polysematic particles is based on several linguisitic units such as the [MOTION]verb before the particle, the NP phrase followed the particle and other PP+NP structure after the NP phrase. An ABC linear process can be applied to figure out the exact meaning in the context.(3) The most important finding of this research is the semantic constraining principle of BOUNDEDNESS agreement in the syntactic construction of MOTION EVENT sentence.The analysis of MOTION EVENT schema shows that PATH is the core schema of this conceptual framing event. The concept of PATH is the relation between the three other components of FIGURE, MOTION and BACKGROUND. The configuration feature of [+/- SPATIAL BOUNDEDNESS] determines the concept structure configuration of whole MOTION EVENT. A bounded PATH entails a bounded moving time, an independent figure with clear boundaries, a background with its boundary overlapping with the path.Since language system reflects the conceptualization of cognition, for a sentence of MOTION EVENT to stand, language users are supposed to choose the words and constructions which express the concept content and structure features. If the PATH concept to be expressed is a [+bounded] one, all the linguistic forms related to the PATH expression need to be [+bounded] . This principle of BOUNDEDNESS agreement or concord can be divided into three sub-principles.â… . In a MOTION EVENT construction, if the PATH concept expressed is spatially bounded, then the linguistic units expressing time and aspect in the sentence should be construed as bounded too.â…¡. In a MOTION EVENT construction, if the PATH concept expressed is spatial bounded, then the lexicalization units of GROUND need to be [+BOUNDED].â…¢. In a MOTION EVENT construction, if the PATH concept is expressed by more than one linguistic units, then for a PATH lexicon to be fit in a PATH construction, the lexicon and the construction share a common [BOUNDEDNESS] feature. On the other hand, if the linguistic units to be combined are of the same word class, the semantic selection constrains are mainly conceptual content bounded.(4) The fourth finding of this research is that by applying this BOUNDEDNESS agreement principle, some lights have been shed on the solutions to several syntactic organization problems or grammatical problems in both English and Chinese MOTION EVENT expressions.It is discovered that some grammatical problems are essentially caused by semantic constraints from concept content or structure requirements. Questions surveyed include the selective constraints on verbs in Chinese static existential sentences, English WAY constructions, English Distance PATH constructions, English and Chinese dative constructions. Corpora data from BNC and CCL have been used to test the solutions. The corpora data largely support the applicability of the general agreement principle and three sub-principles proposed.The paper concludes that the configurational feature of [BOUNDEDNESS], similar to the grammatical feature of [ASPECT] and [NUMBER] , can be a very important syntactic-semantic interface in constructing sentences. For a linguistic unit to fit in a construction, it has to be semantically selected to meet the requirements of expressing both the conceptual event content and conceptual structure.