The Cognitive Analysis On The Collocation Of English Collective Unit Noun And The Noun Modified

Collective unit noun measures two, two more similar things or abstract things as awhole. In the contrastive study of Chinese classifiers and English unit nouns, it is found thatthere is a large and complicated system of English collective unit nouns but a small andsimple system of Chinese collective classifiers. Current researches on collective unit nounsmainly focus on their types, pragmatic function, rhetoric characteristics, and translation. Thepresent study will employ metaphor and metonymy theory, conceptual blending theory andimage schema within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics to explore the metaphorical andmetonymic mechanism in the unconventionalization of collocation between collective unitnouns and the nouns modified, to investigate the semantic relations and the motivations in thecollocations in the hope of providing cognitive grounds for this linguistic phenomenon andmore fully demonstrating the close relation between cognition and language.According to the semantic relationship between collective unit nouns and the nounsmodified, we classify the collocation relationships into five categories: synonymy orhyponymy relationship, verb-object relationship, property displacement relationship, specificreference relationship, container location relationship. Through analysis, we have found1)all the collocation relationships are constructed with metaphorical and metonymicalmechanisms, except the specific reference category;2) in the unconventional collective unitnoun collocations, the metaphorical mechanism is realized by two cognitive modes: ExplicitImage Mode and Implicit Image Mode, and the metonymical mechanism, is realized byActive Image Mode and Passive Image Mode;3) in the matching relations between collectiveunit nouns and the nouns modified, the use of the collective unit nouns reflects the user’sperception of nouns. The metaphorical collocation between the collective unit nouns and thenouns modified reflects the user’s cognition of the relevant categories represented by thenouns, or rather, the unit nouns and the nouns are mapping relations between two images,actually. And the metonymic collocation reflects the user’s cognition of the category of the nouns by means of highlighting the prominent features of entities.