| Human's cognition is complex and mysterious. As far as cognitive linguistics is concerned, the cognitive process of human language is "Reality--Cognition---Language". Embodied Philosophy thinks human beings began to recognize the world by recognizing the space and self first, and the concept of the body is one base of many abstract concepts that people form later. So as the starting point of people's the cognition of the world, how is the cognition of human self reflected in language? And how does language reflect the cognition of human self? This thesis tries to discuss these two questions.English reflexive pronouns is a kind of special pronoun. The reflexive verb is followed by a reflexive pronoun and reflexive pronouns can reflect back to the body. The studies on the reflexive focus on the first Principle "An anaphor must be bound in its Governing Category" since Chomsky's Binding Theory was proposed in 1990s. Observing the contributions of those researches, one has to concede that all the studies are done from either semantics or syntax angle and the reflexivity of the reflexive has been ignored.This thesis tries to study the cognitive process of human self in three levels: from the experience of the body to emotional awareness , and finally idioms containing the reflexives. Since language is changing as cognition develops, the disappearance and concealment of the reflexive in the three levels can speak of the process how people recognize self. Through a large quantity of corpora , it is certified that human's recognition of self develops from the flesh body to spiritual self. This is proved by the fact that the reflexivity of the reflexive is gradually strengthened from the bodily embodied verbs to emotional embodied verbs. Meanwhile, the semantic development of certain bodily embodied verbs speaks of people's cognition from body level to a higher spirit level. However, the disappearance and concealment of the reflexive are common with the intransitivity of the verbs and the use of passive voice. The disappearance and concealment of the reflexive are the other evidences to show the more recognition of human self from the body to the spirit from the other way round. |
