A Contrastive Study On The Formalization-Semantics And Its Typology Of State-change Event In Chinese And English

Leonard Talmy,a well-known American linguist,is one of founders of cognitive linguistics.In 2000,he published Toward a Cognitive Semantics(Volume Ⅰ;Volume Ⅱ)which collects his long-term thinking about conceptual structure,the typology and process of conceptual structure.The great work laid a solid foundation for cognitive semantics and brought about a profound effect on other branches of linguistics.In typological study of conceptual structure,Talmy,on the basis of the corresponding relations between deep conceptual structure and surface morphological and syntactic structure,analyzed the lexicalization pattern and event integration typology of "motion event".Later,he furthered his study and proposed the theory of lexicalization typology,which takes "macro-event" for research object and"lexicalization pattern" and "event integration typology" as study paradigm.Nevertheless,studies at home and abroad concerning this topic in recent years have been limited to treating "motion event" only.Therefore,the study chooses "state-change event" in Chinese and English as the object with aims of analyzing the conceptual structure,core schema,formalization and semantics of this event,especially the correlations between the latter two.In order to facilitate the study,corpus and statistics are made use of.Finally,the study further explores the internal mechanisms and external motivations of the differences and similarities between Chinese and English in the above aspects.Firstly,the study analyzes the formalization of Chinese and English "state-change event",which includes the analyses of syntactic structures of the event,the coding forms of each conceptual element.Furthermore,the study also brings the coding form of "morphological element" and "participant of the event" into discussion.Secondly,the study analyzes the semantics of Chinese and English "state-change event",which concerns such subtopics as semantic representation of the event,semantic features of verb roots,satellites,morphological element and participants of the event.Thirdly,based on the above discussions,the study explores the correlations between formalization and semantics in Chinese and English "state-change event",which focuses on the topics of "syntax-semantic mapping","form-semantic correlations","lexicalization patterns","event integration","incremental semantic series",as well as "animacy of the event participants".Statistics show that Chinese and English definitely owns tendentious characteristics in terms of the above correlations,but there is no absolute typological division between the two languages.The findings are as follows:(1)Chinese and English are different in the directness of argument mapping.In other words,Chinese "incomplete mapping" is more dominant while English "complete mapping" holds more advantage.Even so,the formalizing means of semantic elements in Chinese and English can all be classified into four types:"foregrounding","backgrounding","lexicalization",and "structurization".(2)As for lexicalization patterns,Chinese and English are quite common.Among which,verb roots exhibit three major patterns in three types of"state-change event" while satellites exhibit only one major pattern.(3)In the domain of change-of-state,"ground entity" is relatively more prominent for it can not only construct "state-change event" by itself,but closely relates to implicit "transition type".Therefore,"ground entity" is more crucial than "transition type" in the conceptual structure of"state-change event" That is,the study holds that the core schema of "state-change event" is"ground" or "transition type +ground entity".Based on the above findings,Chinese and English"state-change event" exhibit a mixed system of diverse patterns with regard to event integration.Statistics show that both Chinese and English have some equipollently-framed examples.Besides,verb-framed and satellite-framed patterns are more or less parallel in Chinese while verb-framed patterns are obviously dominant in English.(4)For incremental semantic series,Chinese verbs are more of the types of "moot-fuIfillment"and "implied-fulfillment" and less of "attained-fulfillment" type while English owns more"intrinsic-fulfillment" and "attained-fulfillment" verbs and less "implied-fulfillment" verbs.Furthermore,Chinese satellites can express or confirm the meaning of fulfillment while the adding of English satellites often weakens this meaning.In addition,Satellites exhibit more types of semantic modification in Chinese than in English,such as "underfulfillment","overfulfillment","antifulfillment" and "other event".(5)Except for pragmatic factors,in "state-change event",the animacy of participants not only decides the linear order of subject and object,but affects the choice of sentence voice and syntactic patterns.That is,when the animacy of the causer is higher than the causee,transitive structures are dominant;when the animacy of the causer is lower than the causee,passive voice and other marked structures are preferably employed.Besides,the animacy of participants also affects the causative alteration of verbs in "state-change event".Generally,high animate causer and lower animate causee tend to form a complete causal chain which is easier to undergo the process of decausativization.However,with the causal chain as a basic path of conceptualization,subjects of causative"state-change event" are often of broad type of causer and own certain flexibility in animacy.Finally,the study focuses on the explanation of the differences and similarities with respect to formalization-semantics correlations in Chinese and English "state-change event".Firstly,In the conceptualization of "state-change event",the study finds that though "space" can clearly highlight its similarities to the "motion event",it also,to some extent,neglects the personalities of this domain as one subtype of macro-event.Indeed,the "state-change event" and "motion event" are different not only in the "form",but in the "meaning",for which "temporal procession of property" can provide more plausible explanations than "abstract motion of state".Therefore,"time" is more prominent than"space" in the conceptualization of "state-change event".In fact,due to the homology and metaphorical mapping,"space" and "time" are not in complete isolation in the conceptualization of"state-change event".Besides,in the coding of "state-change event","economy","iconicity" and their mutual influence fully embody linguistic adaptations of structure in regards to function.However,due to ancient Chinese as well as typological,pragmatic and diachronical factors,Chinese and English are also different in many aspects of "state-change event".In general,the study takes "state-change event" as a breakthrough point to construct a new TC(tertium comparationis)for Chinese and English contrastive studies.Besides,the study can not only provide references for the study of other subcategory event,but can help to change the present stagnation in the study of macro-event.