| The psychological study proves that people do not give response simultaneously to all the stimuli which act on men’s sense organs but only pay attention to a few of them. The peculiarity that people have a choice and process further for the outside information is called perception trait. To exclude the interference and select a few stimuli or some important aspects of the stimuli are beneficiary for us to know the exoteric things and adopt the outside environment effectively.Talmy (forthcoming) argues that, in a speech situation, a hearer may attend to the linguistic expression produced by a speaker, to the conceptual content represented by that expression, and to the context at hand. However, not all of these materials appear uniformly in the foreground of the hearer’s attention. Rather, various portions or aspects of the expression itself, its content, and its context may have different degrees of salience. Such differences are only partly due to any intrinsically greater interest of certain elements over others. More fundamentally, language itself has an extensive system which assigns different degree salience to the various parts of an expression, to its reference or its context. As for the speech participants, the prototypical case is that the speaker employs this system in formulating an expression and the hearer, largely based on such formulations, allocates his/her attention in a particular pattern over the materials of these domains. The "attention system of language"(forthcoming) is a macro-research plan proposed by Talmy based on his "Attention Phenomena"(2007), but it is just a work report and a research outline at present. Although We accept Talmy’s theory of language attention system, we find his system is wide ranging but not delicate, especially it is over-simple on the study of attention distribution in grammar.Based on Talmy’s macro-attention system of language and guided by attentional view and experiential view of cognitive linguistics, this dissertation explores the language mechanisms and the cognitive laws of attention distribution in grammar from the micro-perspective. This dissertation manages to solve the following three problems:First, which language mechanisms are mainly involved in attention distribution of grammar?Second, which rules are obeyed for these language mechanisms?Third. what are the commonality and the difference between attention distribution of grammar and the attentional properties of the other cognitive systems?The main findings are as follows.First of all. the language mechanisms of attention distribution in grammar are mainly embodied on morphology and syntax. The attention distribution on morphology is essentially involved three aspects: morpheme, word and phrase. The factors of attention distribution on svntax include word order, the elements of sentence, marked and unmarked sentence, tense and aspect, and voice.Second, attention distribution in grammar obeys the following rules.(1) On the macroscopic view:(a) Attention distribution in grammar is the result of the connection between the structure of language and its usage.(b) The change of attention distribution in grammar is gradient but not dichotomous nor all-or-none.(c) The increase or the decrease of attention distribution in grammar is origined from the strength or the weakness of salience.(d) Salience is closely related with construal, and the different salience is resulted from the different construal.(2) On the microscopic view:(a) The increase or decrease of attention distribution refers more to the semantic content of language but not its form.(b) The increase of attention distribution inclines more to the higher level of language but not the contrary.(c) There is difference of attention distribution between the marked and its unmarked expression. For the unmarked, the one which owns higher frequency, simpler form and easier readable meaning get attention distribution easier. For the marked, because the deviation language occupies more cognitive resource, so it gets more attention distribution.Third, there are both commonality and difference between attention distribution in grammar and the attention properties of the other cognitive systems.(1) On the commonality, in the sensory and perceptual system, the stronger of the stimulus is, the more of the attention distribution it gets; in the attention distribution of grammar, the more obvious deviation of the speech is, the more of the attention distribution it gains.(2) On the difference, the increase or decrease of the attention distribution in the sensory and perceptual system is originated from the strength or the weakness of outside stimulus, while in grammar, it is more because of the attention mechanisms of language itself.The cognitive research of attention distribution in grammar is a new topic in the study of attention and language, so this study is valuable in theory and practice.(1) The main theoretical value embodies the following points.(a) The cognitive study of the attentional phenomena in grammar connects the study of attention in psychology and subjectivity, construal and the other issues in cognitive linguistics, which forms the new research increase point in cognitive linguistics.(b) The achievement of psychology on attention is testified in the cognitive study of attentional distribution in grammar and the interdisciplinary study has the theory of attention distribution in grammar more scientific and explanatory.(c) The cognitive study of the attentional phenomena of grammar provides language proofs for the other fields of cognitive science, such as the experimental skill of psycholinguistics, the brain imaging skill of cognitive neuroscience and the simulation skill of artificial intelligence and so on. And the achievement of the cognitive study of the attentional phenomena of grammar can enrich the theory and the research ways on psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic typology and so on.(2) The main practical value includes the following aspects:(a) The achievement of this dissertation can be applied in the teaching practice of spoken language, listening, reading, writing, translation and the others. And it is valuable for teachers in teaching and students in learning to grasp the importance and improve the efficiency of teaching and learning.(b) The achievement of this dissertation can promote language communicator to protrude the chief information and weaken the minor information to improve the communicative efficiency.(c) This dissertation explores the rules of language from its interior, which is helpful for man to discover the cognitive laws and improve language ability of human being and seek the commonality and the difference between language and the other cognitive abilities of man, so it is a reference for the research of cognitive science. |
