Acontrastive Study Of The Grammaticalizations Of Vision Verbs "Jian(见)" And "See"

Cognitive linguistics believes that language is not a direct reflection of the objectiveworld, but people’s construction of the objective world by virtue of perception andexperience. This enlightens us to combine human cognition with the language systemrather than to confine to the internal system of language itself when seeking the evolvingmechanisms of languages. Grammaticalization consists in the increase of the range of amorpheme advancing from a lexical to grammatical, or from a less grammatical to a moregrammatical status (Kurytlowicz,1965:52). In daily life, vision verbs are used bothfrequently and widely. Linguistic studies indicate that the more a word is used, the morepossible that it will be grammaticalized. Hence, to choose vision verbs as the researchsubjects is of easiness for pursuing the mechanisms and motivations of grammaticalization.Chinese vision verb “jian(见)” and English vision verb “see” have a relatively high degreeof semantic equivalence. So far, there has been some grammaticalization studies targeted at“jian(见)” while studies targeted at grammaticalization of “see” are relatively few. And thecontrastive study of these two words is still less.Different from most of the previous researches which studied grammaticalizationsimply from the angle of cognition, lexical meaning or the change of syntactic function,this thesis, based on the event cognitive model of verbs, takes a different perspective tostudy the grammaticalization of English “see” and Chinese “jian(见)” contrastively bysynthesizing image schema, semantic structure and syntactic structure, with an eye toproviding a comparatively overall description and explanation for these two vision verbsand meanwhile to seeking their similarities and differences in terms of the evolution path,mechanism, as well as the degree of grammaticalization. By contrastive method, this studyalso plays a positive role both in the discovery of cognitive universalities concerningChinese and English and in the comprehension of the nature of language.The present thesis discovered that “jian(见)” and “see” have similar pathways andmechanisms of grammaticalization. At the level of image schema, both of them undergo the extension process changing from physical space schema to mental space schema andfinally to speech-act space schema, whose mechanism lies in highlighting visual pattern orvisual result by the mapping of metaphor and metonymy during the cognition process. Atthe semantic level, they experience a similar evolution whereby the visual sense becomesweakened gradually while the lexeme conveying casual relation gets increasingly salient.In this process, the semantic cognitive model achieves the conversion from concreteness toabstractness, which motivated by the semantic competition and re-analysis of the surfacestructure. At syntactic level, with the complication and subjectivization of lexical meaning,these two vision verbs show a tendency developed from simplex event to complex event.In terms of syntactic function, it is the process that they lose the typical feature of actionverbs little by little and gain the trait of function words in the meantime. And themechanism of this process lies in the iconicity between syntactic structure and conceptualexperience, along with the different perspectives in discourse expression.In addition, this thesis has found that there are some distinctions between thegrammaticalizations of “jian(见)” and “see”. Firstly, the semantic distributions of the twoverbs are asymmetric, and the lexical sense of “jian(见)” is richer than that of “see”.Secondly, the mode for the evolution of “jian(见)” can be summarized as twokinds: visual behaviour→pure contact→affix; passive perception→encounter orexperience→passive marker. Whereas, the evolutionary process of “see” is relativelysimplex: visual behaviour→mental behaviour→logical inference. Finally, as for the clineof grammaticalization degree, Chinese “jian(见)” goes further than English “see” since“jian(见)” has already grammaticalized to the stage of affix while “see” still remains in thestage of grammatical word.