A Cognitive Approach To English Existential Construction

Existential construction (henceforth EC) is a particular type of sentence structure appearing in almost all the languages in the world. Owing to its special linguistic characteristics, and its various representations in different languages, EC has attracted many scholars'attention. And they have made a deep research on it. However, the Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) construction pattern and cognitive motivations of EC have been paid little attention.In recent two or three decades, with the development of language and cognition studies, people have found that language is not completely arbitrary, and there is a certain relationship between language structure and experiential structure. Cognitive linguistics claims that language is shaped or at least influenced by our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it (Ungerer&Schmid, 2001). The cognitive constraint and influence on language is first embodied by iconicity, Iconicity is a set of signs whose meaning in some crucial way resembles their form (Nanny&Fischer, 1999:109). It denotes that linguistic structure is a reflection of cognitive or experiential structure. Iconicity is of great significance in revealing the mapping relationship between cognition and language structure.There are different representations of an ICM construction pattern in different languages, which result from different cognitive motivations. For the purpose of seeking the underlying motivations of the English EC, this dissertation first attempts to put forward a universal ICM construction pattern of EC and to figure out the English ICM representations of the ICM construction pattern of EC ( i.e. the English EC in this dissertation ) , and then based on the theory of iconicity, to explain the internal language structure from the external factors by exploring four kinds of mapping relationship between the linguistic structure of the English EC and the conceptual structure it represents, accordingly, to find out the cognitive motivations of the English EC. The four kinds of mapping relationship are the four principles of iconicity. The study finds that the sequence of the English EC tallies with the sequence of the information transfer ; the distance between the components of the English EC is in accordance with the distance of their corresponding concepts; and it indicates the importance or unpredictability of the noun phrase that the length of the noun phrase should be equal to or longer than the length of the verb phrase; and the ground-before-figure model of the English EC is contrary to the figure-ground model of natural word order, which reflects that the ground, as the conceptual starting point of the English EC, is the focus of cognition, and thus is prominent.On the basis of analyzing the principles of iconicity of the English EC, this dissertation attempts to explain the cognitive semantics of its components, such as intransitivity of the verbs embodies a container-content relationship; indefiniteness of the noun phrases denotes unpredictable new information; there is meaningful.In a word, this paper endeavors to study two questions: (i) whether the English EC has ICMs; (ii) whether the principles of iconicity can be used to explain the structure of the English EC, and to discover its underlying cognitive motivations. Then we can find that the ICM construction pattern of EC and iconicity theory can provide a more reasonable explanation for the English EC. This study can also make us grasp the nature of language, and understand the universality and the variety of the languages in the world.