A Study Of Markedness On Passive Voice And Simple Past Tense From Prototype Theory Perspective

Traditional linguists attach great importance on syntax itself, but the deep syntactic studies are transferred to studies on meaning. Nevertheless, grammar and meaning are not independent each other but are correlated with each other. With the development of cognitive linguistics based on the embodied philosophy, cognitive linguists suppose that communication comes out in the process of human being's living which results in the meaning. And grammar is the generalization of the meaning which uses the same syntactic form. Therefore, grammar and meaning are not mutually independent. Human beings need categorization to know the world. Some members of one category are perceived commonly while some need to pay more attention to. The former are the prototypes of the category while the latter are the non-prototypes of the category. As for the learners in the process of learning foreign languages, for instance, English, there do exist some difficult grammatical points which are hard to acquire and remember while there are also some items that are easy. Linguists recognize the latter one as unmarked items while the former ones as the marked ones.In the same way, studies on the passive voice experienced the transformation from the syntactic perspective to the semantic perspective. At the same time, the modern linguists make a study in the view of cognitive linguistics, which is based on embodied philosophy, and analyze the formation of both the syntactic and semantic of the passive voice. They have great tendency to analyze syntax from semantic point of view. But it is found by the author that either the students or the teachers have to pay more great importance to the different syntactic forms of passive voice, such as be-passives and get-passives. For a better solution to this problem, it is started from the cognitive perspective to analyze markedness, to provide cognitive motivation of markedness, which at the same time supports the theoretical instruction to the prototype for the language acquisition as well as learning.As is known to all, passive voice is used in a variety of literary styles. It is widely applied in scientific articles and government report, etc. Meanwhile it is the same with the simple past tense, which is mostly used. Whether learners can master the two will directly affects their everyday life communication.Following the guidance of cognitive linguistics and prototype theory, this research has a study on the different syntactic forms of passive voice and analyzes the prototype effects in the markedness, which is also explained in terms of semantics to strengthen the illustration on syntactic formation. To make the analysis more representative, passive voice is for syntactic level while the simple past tense is chosen for the semantic level, which serves to reflect the markedness in prototype category more fully.The paper consists of five parts. Chapter One is the introduction of the whole thesis. It provides the background, significance and organization of this thesis. In Chapter Two, the origin and development of markedness, in addition to studies made by other linguistic scholars, are reviewed and commented. So are a variety of studies on passive voice and simple past tense. Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation of the whole paper, in which the prototype theory and classic theory are compared. Besides, some features of prototype theory are introduced so as to instruct this research. Chapter Four is about the analysis of markedness in passive voice and simple past tense on prototype theory with detail. The different syntactic forms of passive voice and semantic meanings of simple past tense are analyzed. What follows is the conclusion of this paper—Chapter Five, which presents the implication as well as the limitation of this paper.