Realization Of Basic Level Category In English Cognate Object Construction

This thesis aims to analyze English cognate object construction, including the cognate verbs and events, from the perspective of basic level category.Cognate object is a special language phenomenon in English. When an object is lexically cognate with its verb, and it tends to repeat the meaning of the verb, such construction is called cognate object construction. It is difficult to confine the occurrence of cognate objects in English to a regular small subset of verbs as is the case in other languages. Cognate object constructions are relatively infrequent across languages and, when present, they are restricted to a limited range of semantic and syntactic domains. This thesis intends to analyze cognate object construction from a new cognitive perspective—basic level category, with the hope of giving a novel explanation to cognate object construction and helping people understand this language phenomenon better.Cognitive linguistics is different from the traditional explanation of grammatical structure and word meaning. It is an approach to language that is based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize the world. Today modern linguistics is presented by three main approaches: the experiential view, the prominence view and the attentional view of language. The theory of basic level category is based on human being's experience and the main branch of cognitive linguistics on the experiential view. It is at the basic level of categorization that people conceptualize things as perceptual and functional gestalts and the basic level is where the largest amount of information about an item can be obtained with the least cognitive effort. Basic level category is the most natural and rapid access to cognitive perception, it is the level which is first named and understood by children, and also with the shortest primary lexemes.The theory of basic level category gives a new perspective to analyze the cognate object construction. Firstly the thesis summarizes and analyzes the special syntactic and semantic characteristics of English cognate object construction according to many scholars'literature. And then presents the cognate verbs and cognate object constructions collected from magazines, books and BNC. By analyzing the data collected, the thesis summarizes the cognitive features of cognate objects and then draws a cognitive model of cognate object construction in terms of the idealized cognitive model. The thesis also interprets the relation between basic level category and cognate verbs & events by applying the theory of mental imagery, stereotypical relation of nouns and verbs, and the gestalt principle. At last comes to the conclusion: the cognate verbs belong to the basic level action category; and the events belong to the basic level event category.In a whole, this thesis can be regarded as a tentative and a pioneering attempt to study English cognate object construction from the perspective of basic level category. The significance of this research is that it initiates a new perspective to probe into the common linguistics issues and at the same time addresses the importance of cognitive linguistics, especially the basic level category. In the future, the research is hoped to go deeper in this field with the development of the theory of cognitive linguistics.