A Cognitive Study Of English Resultatives From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration

As a particular linguistic phenomenon, English resultatives have attractedpervasive attention from both linguists and grammarians at home and abroad. Englishresultatives refer to a special pattern with a verb and a result-state phrase attached to ascomplements. They are independent linguistic structures in grammatical level withcertain particularity and complexity. Most scholars make investigations of Englishresultatives on pure syntax-semantics interface which only pay attention to languageform depicting without awareness of the cognitive process buried in.This thesis applies conceptual integration theory as fundamental to exploreEnglish resutatives from the cognitive perspective. It probes into cognitive blendingoperations underlying generation process of English resultatives and reveals what isexactly blended in mind when human process such linguistic form. According to theanalysis, the study sheds light on the cognitive mechanism of English resultatives. It isclaimed that as a result of interaction between language and cognition, the generationof such linguistic form is on the basis of human’s experientialism. The generationprocess includes conceptual and grammatical blending. After setting up two inputspaces, English resultatives can be generated in the blended space through projection,composition, completion and elaboration to emerge its own structure. What’s more, itfinds that types of different resultatives can be construed better in terms of conceptualintegration.This study aims at elaborating the cognitive operation underlying the generationprocess of English resultatives from a deeper level of understanding the essence ofEnglish resultatives on the one hand and manifesting conceptual integration as apervasive cognition method which involves great explanatory power on the other hand.Besides, it also offers some inspirations to language teaching and learning of suchlinguistic form.