The Cognitive Investigation Of Double Predicate

With the vigorous development of cognitive science, cognitive linguistics is gradually attracting more and more attention in the field of linguistics, providing us with a new perspective and method for the studies of language. Based on the figure/ground theory in cognitive linguistics, this paper restudies the controversial topic of double predicate in the English language.The previous studies of double predicate are chiefly carried out from the aspect of grammar, where different opinions exist. The author studies this problem by employing the figure/ground theory, trying not to repeat what scholars have done from the traditional grammatical way. According to the deep syntactic structure of double predicate, we change it into a complex sentence with a subordinate clause of time. In the structure of time event, "A larger, temporally containing event acts as ground with respect to a contained event as figure" (Talmy, 1978:640). The author infers that in double predicate, DP₂ is the figure and DP₁ the ground on the basis of inclusion and contingency principles of figure/ground in complex sentences and parameters related to figure/ground. In some special cases, DP₁ can be regarded as the figure and DP₂ the ground. Besides, the author summarizes an equation: Double Predicate = Event I + Event II and points out the advantages of studying double predicate within the framework of cognitive linguistics.The author makes a further investigation on the cognitive causation of the syntactic structure of double predicate. The sequential order of syntactic elements reflects the order of physical experiences or events (Shen Jiaxuan, 1993). In the process of cognition, the motional event that DP₁ represents is prior to the static events DP₂ stands for. On the other hand, human's cognitive process complies with the principle of information transmission from old to new; DP₂ carries more information than DP) and thus is the information focus, which is in accordance with the principle of end focus. Therefore, iconicity of order and information focus work together to affect the syntactic structure of double predicate.