| From the very early history of human,people started forming the concepts of numbers,numerals began to sprout,in Chinese we have“结绳记事”.Regardless of the different cultural backgrounds,the decimal is commonly used.Although the five hexadecimal can be found in other languages,but the there are still questions remained,why the cardinals in the aspects of morphosyntactic have both the properties of nouns and adjectives,why different numerals,especially when numerals that are small numbers and the numerals that are big numbers,they are not the same in the aspect of word property,for example,the small numbers usually have a dual nature of adjectives and nouns,while the large numerals are more like nouns.All these questions have been studied in the past.Our country started late in the field of numerals.In the 1980s,the studies about numerals just got started.The domestic scholars mainly focus on the structures of numerals and the meanings behind the numerals.Numerals are considered as an enclosed system in the past studies.Due to the influence of Chomsky’s school,the studies about numerals showed the stiffness in one way or another.“七A八B”is just one of daily numerals in the Chinese language,but it has its own characters.And the comparison between numerals from Chinese and English will be also mentioned,which we can get the limited view of the numerals.Wishfully it will accumulate the humble achievement in the study of numerals.This paper will study the numerals from the angle of cognitive linguistics. Especially, Langacker’s idea about word classes will be discussed. And the theory of categorization and decategorization will also been used. The study of meaning can not be separated from the changes of the language. Maybe to use the cognitive grammar can lighten the way for the study of language changes. The innovation in cognition will eventually lead to language’s innovation. In the process of categorization and decategorization, numeral’s word property line becomes fuzzy. Langacker pointed out that the traditional way of classifying the word is too stiff. He believes that the adjectives, adverbials and preposition belong to the same class- the atemporal relation. Langacker’s ideas towards word classes has inspired me to study the Chinese numerals. Chomsky’s school are interested in the “visible” language phenomena. They chose to “ignore” the meaning intentionally or unintentionally. Not only that, Chomsky’s school is weak at explaining the word meaning.By the analyzing of the numerals in the angle of cognitive grammar, this paper draws the following conclusion: we will see that the numerals have their own characteristics, in the practical daily use, the numerals can function as adjectives, adverbials, both the shifts of word classes and changes of numeral’s meanings, they are resulted from the decategorization and the process is gradual, the shift and change are not sudden. and further we can conclude that the cognitive linguistics have its own advantage over the Chomsky’s school. |
