English Impersonal Construction: The Semantic Constraints On Predicates And Meaning Construction

Impersonal Construction (or Impersonals) is ubiquitous in language. It reflects the wayof conceptualizing event, and expresses a stative and abstract constructional meaning. TheEnglish impersonal construction, one of the typical impersonal constructions in English, isusually made up of “Impersonal Marker it+Impersonal Predicate+Impersonal Referent”.The Impersonal Marker it symbolizes the Cognitive Reference Field of this construction,while the Impersonal Referent specifies its referent. Meanwhile, the Impersonal Predicate,with adjectives, nouns, or lexical verbs as its semantic focus, indicates senses of judgment,emotion, evaluation or attitude in the typical form of “BE+AP”, and profiles a stative eventsituation. The English impersonal construction is a kind of Abstract Cognitive ReferencePoint Construction in nature. It defocuses the conceptualizer as generalized conceptualizerand primarily focuses on the Cognitive Reference Field. As the primary focal prominence, theCognitive Reference Field highlights conceptualizer’s “scope of awareness”, and is also akind of cognitive starting point and constructional reference point for apprehending what ismanifested within it. Thus, English impersonal construction reflects our ability toconceptualize an even more abstract entity via the other abstract entity, and this is one of theadvanced cognitive abilities of human beings. The English impersonal construction has atypical construction meaning: within the Cognitive Reference Field profiled by theimpersonal marker it, any conceptualizer, even a defocused generalized conceptualizer, hasthe ability to conceptualize the “validity” of Impersonal Referent and eventually makes apsychological judgment according to the conceptual content of the impersonal predicate. Theconstruction as a whole reflects clearly the abstractness of reference point and describesstative events and psychological activities.As an indispensable and so widely used element in language, Impersonal Constructionhas been studied by quite a number of scholars, home and abroad, from the perspectives of itssyntactic structure, functions, semantic features, etc. in terms of its form and/or meaningrespectively. There are also researches on the cognitive mechanism of the construction fromthe viewpoint of Cognitive Linguistics. All these researches have yielded fruitful results. Yet,insufficiencies still remain in the above studies and first and for most there is not a cleardefinition of Impersonal Construction among all the scholars. Generally speaking, the previous studies mainly focus on describing features of this construction under differenttheory systems, without analyzing the relation and motivation between its form and meaning.As for the English Impersonal Construction, most of the previous studies have mainly focusedon the syntactic structure of the construction or on the semantic content of impersonal it in theform of causal exemplification, case study or qualitative description based on usageclassification. But so far seldom have we found the significant breakthroughs gained intheorizing in order to analyze the interaction relation between the construction and itscomponents, let alone systematic, qualitative and quantitative researches under the frameworkof Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar with sufficient statistical evidence.In order to bridge up the gap, this dissertation, guided by the basic assumptions ofConstruction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar, proposes a new integrated CognitiveReference Field Control Model out of the “Control Cycle Model” and “Cognitive ReferencePoint Theory” in an attempt to conduct a survey on the semantic relationship between theimpersonal predicates and the English impersonal construction so as to detect the predicatesselection restrictions of this construction and its meaning construction. Cognitive ReferenceField Control Model is based on the following three basic assumptions:1)“summaryscanning” and “sequential scanning” must be involved in mental scanning and they togetherform one of the human fundamental cognitive abilities;2) construction, as the basic unit forlinguistic study, is a composite form-meaning structure, within it there exists both interactionbetween construction and its components and integration among constructional components;3)meaning is constructed dynamically on line based on usage events, thus it is embodied,encyclopedic and schematic. Therefore, on the basic assumption that conceptual structure isformed on the basis of human embodiment and interaction with and awareness of the externalworld, Cognitive Reference Field Control Model holds the view that people (specifically, theconceptualizer) intend to adopt the cognitive domain, which is constructed from the basicconceptual structure, as the background for the current recognition activity so as to reachmental contact to the abstract target and even control it within the “immediate scope ofawareness”. This control is, in nature, a kind of cognitive process in the way of understandingor conceptualizing a more abstract entity through another abstract one, namely, from abstractentity to more abstract entity. That is to say, Cognitive Reference Field Control Model abidesto the reference point principle of human cognition. And in this new theoretical framework,the interaction relationship and meaning construction of English impersonal construction could gain a relatively more plausible and reasonable interpretation.The methodology of this dissertation is a combination of qualitative and quantitativemethods with a relatively more emphasis on the former. It is qualitative, for the study istheory-oriented, and it is quantitative, for the study employs a usage-based and data-basedanalytical approach. In order to be qualitative, the Cognitive Reference Field Control Modelcan serve as the theoretical framework of the present study, while in order to be quantitative,this dissertation analyzes the data of108,696of usage instances with the index formula of “It+Link Verb+AP+X”,“It+Link Verb+NP+X” and “It+Lexical Verb (+NP)+X”. Thisdata is collected from the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary AmericanEnglish with10link verbs,100adjectives,70nouns, and50lexical verbs as indexical itemsaccording to their usage frequency. With a detailed analysis of the data, the result shows that,impersonal predicates usually take adjectives, nouns, or lexical verbs as their semantic focus.By analyzing the data according to usage frequency and typicality, we have found thefollowing syntactic features:1) link verb be shows the highest usage frequency in corpustypically in the form of “BE+AP”;2) the typical hierarchy of impersonal predicates is LinkVerb+AP> Link Verb+NP> Lexical Verb+NP; and3) the typical hierarchy of impersonalreferents is that-clause> to-clause>-ing clause> wh-clause. What is more important, thisdissertation investigates the semantic features of impersonal predicates in English impersonalconstruction, and their commonalities are generalized as follows:1) they all share the stative,abstract and subjective semantic features, and reflect psychological activities;2) they mainlyexpress senses of judgment, emotion, attitude, evaluation, and so on;3) subjective judgmentis the typical semantic content of impersonal predicates.On the basis of the Cognitive Reference Field Control Model, this dissertation focuses itsattention on the study of the semantic constraints of the English impersonal construction onpredicates and its meaning construction by analyzing the interaction between construction andits components. As far as the analysis of interaction is concerned, there are two macro aspects,i.e., the semantic aspect and the semantic-syntactic interface aspect. As for the former,detailed systematic description and explanation have been conducted of the semantic featuresof Impersonal Marker it, Impersonal Predicates and Impersonal Referents based on the dataand statistical results. As for the latter, there are two micro aspects. On the one hand, with adetailed analysis of all the target predicates, an investigation into the semantic constraints ofthe English impersonal construction on predicates has been revealed, based on the common features they share, as follows:1) the predicate must describe an event situation in order tohighlight its stativity;2) the predicate must reflect the subjective interpretation of ageneralized conceptualizer towards the target proposition in order to highlight its subjectivity;3) the predicate must symbolize an abstract conceptual structure in order to highlight itsabstractness; and4) the predicate should express the psychological activities or emotion of ageneralized conceptualizer. The features expressed by the predicates are related to those of theEnglish impersonal construction in three ways. They are1) the stative relation profiled by thetarget adjectives shows their connections to the stativity of the construction;2) the abstractthing profiled by the target nouns shows their connections to the abstractness of theconstruction;3) the psychological process profiled by the target verbs shows their connectionsto the psychological event profiled by the construction. In a word, it is these connectionsbetween the target predicates and the construction that reveal their semantic compatibility, andmake their co-occurrence possible.On the other hand, an exploration of the functions and features concerning the meaningconstruction of English impersonal construction has been conducted within the theoreticalframework of Cognitive Reference Field Control Model, and shows that the constructionalcomponents work differently as follows: the Impersonal Marker it constructs the CognitiveReference Field of the construction, the Impersonal Predicates construct stative eventsituation and the Impersonal Referents specify the referred content. The whole process ofmeaning construction shows that meaning construction has usch features as gestalt, abstractreference point and generalized reference.All in all, guided by the theoretical framework of Cognitive Reference Field ControlModel, this study extends the investigation of interaction between construction and itscomponents from verbs into pronouns, adjectives and nouns. All the description, analysis andexplanation in this dissertation are based on authentic data, and the semantic constraints of theconstruction on predicates and its meaning construction features are revealed. In addition, thisstudy of the English impersonal construction from the perspective of Cognitive ReferenceField Control Model provides a new angle for investigation, and this dissertation itself may bea further development of the study of the English impersonals as well.