A Cognitive Analysis Of Grammaticalization Of The Entity-referring Spatial Demonstratives In English And Chinese

It is all known that spatial deixis plays an important role in relating languages to the outside world, and that it serves as the basis for a variety of metaphorical extension in almost all languages. As a subcategory of spatial deixis, demonstratives are regarded as basic vocabulary in most languages and can be used to refer to entity, place, time, manner, and degree, etc.. This thesis sets out to examine the entity-referring spatial demonstratives (entity-referring demonstratives for short) in English and Chinese, namely, the English this/that and the Chinese zhelna. It makes a synchronic study of grammaticalization of the entity-referring demonstratives in the two languages from a pragmatic and a syntactic perspective respectively, and to explore the grammaticalization process and the cognitive mechanisms behind this process.First, this thesis makes a synchronic analysis of grammaticalization of the entity-referring demonstratives in English and Chinese from pragmatic and syntactic perspectives. From a pragmatic perspective, the entity-referring demonstratives have both basic uses and extended uses. The basic uses include exophoric uses and endophoric uses. The latter can be subdivided into anaphoric, discourse deictic and recognitional uses while the former are regarded as the primary uses, from which the other three types of the endophoric uses have been evolved. From a syntactic perspective, both the English this/that and the Chinese zhelna occur mostly in the same syntactic context as pronouns (pronominal demonstratives) and determiners (adnominal demonstratives); however, pronominal and adnominal demonstratives in the two languages are grammaticalized into different grammatical markers and they have different grammaticalization channels. Therefore, this study proposes that grammaticalization of the entity-referring demonstratives follows a cline ranging from exophoric demonstratives that are used to orient the hearer in the outside world to various grammatical markers that serve specific syntactic functions, as the following cline shows:exophoric uses> endophoric uses> extended uses> grammaticalized usesSecond, this thesis also makes a tentative exploration to put forward that metaphor and metonymy are the cognitive mechanisms behind grammaticalization of the entity-referring demonstratives. By metaphor, the entity-referring demonstratives in English and Chinese are mapped from extralinguistic domains to linguistic domains, gradually realizing the mapping from spatial domains to temporal domains, from exophoric uses to discourse deictic uses, and from physical spaces to mental or emotional spaces; by conceptual metonymy, the entity-referring demonstratives are gradually grammaticalized into such grammatical markers as relative pronoun, sentence connective, complementizer, definite article or possessive marker, etc..This study may hopefully contribute to a deeper understanding of grammaticalization of the entity-referring spatial demonstratives in English and Chinese. The theoretical values are as follows:(ⅰ) it concludes that the entity-referring spatial demonstratives should be ranked among the basic vocabularies as the lexical words and they can be further grammaticalized to more grammatical words; (ⅱ) the grammaticalization of demonstratives is a universal phenomenon; (ⅲ) it further proves Lakoff and Johnson's propositions about conceptual metaphors:SPACE is the basic concept in the source domain; (ⅳ) it also provides a good example to prove that human's cognition is ego-deictic and it is from the simplicity to the complexity and from the concreteness to the abstractness. In addition, this study may facilitate the mutual translations of the entity-referring demonstratives in English and Chinese and it may also have some pedagogical value for teaching both English and Chinese as foreign languages.