Schema Based Metaphorical Expansion Of The Give Concept

The give event is one of the most common events in our daily life; it means thata giver passes the control over something to a recipient. Correspondingly, the giveconcept is also a pervasive concept in people’s experience. The give sentence, thelinguistic form of the give concept, is an important sentence category in English. Andas a typical intransitive construction, it is a hot issue in linguistic field. Lots ofresearches have been done to explore this linguistic construction by linguists fromdifferent schools both abroad and at home.On the basis of the prototype category theory of the cognitive linguistics, thisthesis analyses the metaphorical expansion of the four key elements of the giveconcept, describes the inner relationship of the non-prototype of the give constructionin the way of drawing the relation schema.The study shows that the prototype of the give concept is that an animate humangiver intentionally passes the control over a physical concrete object to a humanrecipient, which causes the thing being transferred to change its ownership or locationinstantaneously and visibly. The key elements of the prototypical give concept are theanimate human, a human recipient, the physical concrete object, instantaneously andvisibly. Concept is the result of people’s conceptualization of the daily lives. And theprototypical concept is the core of the concept; it includes the typical characteristicsof the category. With the development of the people’s recognize ability and under thefunction of the cognitive mechanism, people conceptualize the similar event on thebasis of the give concept. In this way, the concept is enriched and expanded. The newcomponents which be absorbed are non-prototype concept. In the process of theexpansion, the four key elements go toward the periphery. On the basis of theprevious research, the thesis analyses the inner relationship of the non-prototypeconcept and draws the conclusion that there are five types of non-prototype sentences.