A Study Of Syntactic And Semantic Features And Cognitive Motivation Of Semantic Disorientation In Mandarin

The semantic disorientation phenomenon finds its best instantiation in the complemental and modificational disorientation structures.“Form-meaning mismatch”hypotheses,such as Displacement Theory,Form-meaning Mismatch and Grammatical Metaphor,proposed by previous studies are found wanting in the characterization of the nature of this phenomenon,the description of its syntactic and semantic features and,further more,the exploration of its cognitive motivation in a systematic manner.Cognitive linguistics provides a possible solution for the problems.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,the present study is mainly concerned with three questions as follows: What typical syntactic features do disorientated structures have?What semantic features do disorientated structures have? And how are the forms and meaning of these structures motivated? The major findings are as follows.First,the structures stand as excellent instantiations of language iconicity.Conceptual structures lie behind syntactic forms.Meaning is conceptualization.Meaning is immeasurable while the available syntactic structures in a specific language are finite.Therefore,people have to innovate new means of expression to ensure successful communication while guarantee the efficiency and economy of information exchange.Although different kinds of semantic disorientational structures perform varyingly with regard to their syntax,it is found that sentences with semantically disoriented elements do have severer limitations on morphological forms,quantifiers,aspect and syntactic patterns compared to sentences without such elements.Second,shared semantic characteristics are found among different kinds of semantic disorientation related structures.Semantic orientation is the major topic in the study.From an isolated perspective,the argument structures of the disorienting modifiers and complements stay untouched after their placement in these structures(or constructions)while the argument structures and semantic orientation of the disorienting structures are closely related with the disorienting element from a holistic view.It is also found that disorienting structures feature higher information density and subjectivity,which result from speakers’ intentional syntactic arrangements.Third,semantic disorientation is cognitively motivated and its essence lies in the reversal of the entrenched figure-ground relations,which stem form different ways of construal.The disorientated structures are linguistic manifestations of people’s cognitive construal.Disorientated modifier-head structures reflect varying profilings of the same event or the switch of the manners of mental scanning by the conceptualizers.The disorienting constituents stand as inputs for the blending mental space of the structures,which feature emergent properties.Disorienting structures are also pragmatically motivated and bear with them high subjectivity and communicative purposes.Disorienting verb-complement structures reverse the original figure-ground relations and the complements construct framing events and stand as the figures instead.They have their own argument structures or share arguments with the verbs.The findings are in line with the cognitive claim that different syntactic structures represent different images.There’s no solid evidence for the existence of source sentences and the consequent syntactic transformations as claimed by the“Form-meaning mismatch” hypotheses.Semantic disorientation-related structures are ubiquitous in Mandarin but heterogeneous as a group,they differ dramatically with regard to their linguistic motivations,syntactic and semantic features,and pragmatic effects,but share the same cognitive motivations.The present study defines and categorizes the phenomenon of semantic disorientation on a solid cognitive and psychological base,and constructs a description-explanation frame.Systematic and in-depth survey of its syntactic &semantic features,cognitive motivations are carried following the frame.The study expands the research range of cognitive linguistics,deepens the study of Chinese grammar from cognitive perspective and,hopefully,benefits and facilitates the development of Chinese language instruction,artificial intelligence,speech recognition,instant translation in the long run.