| It is well known that in1950s a cognitive revolution occurred in America and European countries leading to cognitive science, a science researching for human perception and information processing. It includes perceptual input, problem solutions, individual and social cognition and features of human intelligence and machine intelligence.(Shi Zhongzhi&Yu Zhihua1990)In1999, two American scholars, Lakoff&Johnson, make a further account for the fact that cognitive science is a science for conceptual system, a science for mind derived from experiences. They divide cognitive sciences into first generation of cognitive science and second generation of cognitive science.In2004, Howard suggests a third generation of cognitive science, neuroscience. It applies imaging techniques to account for the complicated relation between human cognitive activities, language competence and neurons in the brain. It attempts to explore the secrets of human advanced-order processing in the brain (Qi Zhenhai&Peng Danling2007).The second and third generations of cognitive science attempt to employ brain imaging techniques to research for the cognitive neural mechanism behind linguistic processing to explore the secrets of human advanced-order brain function. Therefore, such a research is full of theoretical significance and full of great value in application.Language is a unique tool for human beings. The cognitive research for language has become an important issue in biolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and neurolinguistics. This dissertation attempts to apply theories of cognitive linguistics into an account of the continuum of modern Chinese evidentiality and evidentials of "visual-auditory-speech" verbs in order to explore the cognitive mechanism and cultural motivation behind Chinese evidentials. First of all, Chapter two makes an objective description of human evidentiality, investigating its usage occasions, causes and patterns. Then, it applies language subjectivity, intersubjectivity, construction grammar and mental spaces to account for the cognitive mechanism behind Chinese evidentials. Thirdly, it makes an experimental research to account for the cognitive mechanism by providing a great number of data collected from CCL corpus. Finally, it provides a theoretical guidance and a research paradigm for evidentials in minority languages.Chapter one gives a brief introduction to academic background and its significance. When human beings use their languages, they consciously or unconsciously express the source of information to indicate the reliability of their speech. This is evidential function. The evidentials include:words, phrases, parenthesis and syntactic formation. That is, the listener makes a judgment whether the speaker says is true or false. That is to say, the listener can make a judgment on whether the speech is reliable or not by words, phrases, parenthesis and syntactic formation made by the speaker. The corpus used in this dissertation is written materials collected from CCL corpus and100works of Chinese Modern literature.Chapter two introduces definitions, usage occasions, motivation for evidentials and approaches to understanding evidentials. It reviews4theories of evidentiality:Chafe’s theory (1986), Anderson’s theory (1986), Palmer’s theory (2001) and Aikhenvald’s theory (2004). It classifies evidentials into restricted category and broad category.Chapter three introduces4theories concerning with evidentiality: linguistic subjectivity, intersubjectivity, construction grammar and mental spaces. Linguistic subjectivity indicates when a speaker makes an utterance, it is necessary for him to adopt a stance, an epistemic stance towards the source of information. An epistemic stance is a necessary part of information construction, playing an important part with others. The motivation for a speaker’s adaptation of a stance is a pragmatic issue, which can be comprehensively understood by the analysis of expressions made by the speaker.Chapter four selects3categories of Chinese sensory verbs, epistemic verbs and speech verbs. They belong to psychological verbs and are full of significance in research. The classification of sensory words is based on cognitive categorization of sensory events. Any event can be described as a semantic frame, in which3classes of content entities exist. They are sensory agent, sensory action and sensory sequence corresponding to3classes of grammatical categories:sensory nouns, sensory verbs and sensory adjectives. In accordance with a natural classification of five senses, sensory words can be classified into visual words, auditory words, olfactory words, gustatory words and tactile words.Chapter five introduces the definition of grammaticalization. In linguistics, grammaticalization is a process by which words representing objects and actions transform to become grammatical markers. The dissertation focuses on restricted grammaticalization, that is, a process thereby content words become grammatical markers, grammatical categories, and grammatical structures, conventional expressions. It searches for the reasons why those sensory verbs, such as, visual verbs, epistemic verbs and speech verbs become discourse markers with evidential features.In Chapter six, we make a conclusion. The cognitive mechanism behind modern Chinese evidentiality includes grammaticalization, cognitive metaphor, lexicalization and cultural motivation.The dissertation is based on three generations of cognitive sciences, the first generation of cognitive sciences based on Chomsky’s bio-linguistics, the second generation based on Lakoff&Johnson’s notion that language, cognition and thought are rooted in sensory motor system, the third generation based of Howard’s imaging techniques to explore the secrets of language and neurons in human brain. Cognitive sciences provide a guidance for language cognitive research, especially for modern Chinese evidentiality.In the future, the author will continue a comprehensive research on Chinese sensory verbs, epistemic verbs and speech verbs and make an exhaustive investigation into semantic, syntactic and pragmatic, discourse usage of those verbs. The author will apply the achievements of evidentials into international communication to enhance mutual understanding and friendship between countries and human races. |
