A Study On The Cognitive Mechanism Of English Subjunctive Mood

Subjunctive mood is such a kind of grammatical category that expresses speaker’s subjective hypotheses and wishes. Being one of the three important moods in English, it has become the research focus of grammarians and linguists. Many scholars such as Onions(1904), Todd(1986), Echkersley(1982), Quirk et al.(1985),Zhang Zhenbang(1995), Sun Hongren(1996), He Zhaoxiong(1999) and so on, have analyzed English subjunctive mood from different angles, such as the definition, nature, classification, formation and pragmatic meaning etc.. However,these researches offer explanations or descriptions which only focus on one aspect of subjunctive mood, not present a comprehensive and coherent elaboration on the inner forming mechanism, purpose as well as the corresponding result of it. At the same time, most of the previous studies sorely expound the operation mechanism of subjunctive mood, which shows insufficiency and imperfection on the cognitive study of the subjunctive mood. Namely, the emphases of these studies lie in the causes, ignoring the purpose and result of the subjunctive mood application.Furthermore, as the significant theories in Cognitive Linguistics, salience, iconicity and prototype provide solid theoretical support for the explanation of linguistic phenomena. Regrettably, many linguistic researches apply these theories isolatedly rather than associate them together. That is to say, they couldn’t consider the inner link between these three theories, which result in less comprehensive elaboration for linguistic facts.In view of this, the author of this thesis tries to establish a SIP model which aims to make up for the study absence of subjunctive mood and further make an all-around cognitive explanation.In the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, initially, the author tries to take advantage of the relationship between salience view, iconicity view and prototype view, together with their own demerits in expounding the inner operation mechanismof English subjunctive mood, to establish a integrated cognitive model—SIP(more detail in chapter three). Then, under the theoretical framework of SIP model, this study sees salience as the objective, iconicity as the strategy, and therefore comes to the conclusion: English subjunctive mood can be divided into the prototypical(Were-type) and non-prototypical(Be-type). This thesis mainly applies Iconic tense( Iconic tense refers to the fact that different tenses used normally reflect different psychological states of human beings. The irreversibility of time is iconic to the psychological inaccessibility. Seeing the objective time of speaking as a benchmark,the time showed by past tense/past perfect tense is irreversible relative to the objective time of speaking. Therefore, the event presented by past tense or past perfect tense is out of reach for now, it can only be imagined psychologically but not happen eventually, which makes the hypothetical meaning profiled. Conversely, the advance of time is iconic to the psychological accessibility. Since the time showed by zero tense can be reached relative to the objective time of speaking, there exists the possibility of implementation in the future, which makes the hypothetical meaning deprofiled) and also exerts the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods,to investigate the systemic operation mechanism of 210 items from the closed corpus on English subjunctive mood. By doing this, the author attempts to provide a unified and coherent explanation about the holistic operation mechanism of English subjunctive mood through which learners can get a profound understanding and have a good command of SM.