A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metonymy To Causative Construction In English And Chinese

The causative concept lies ubiquitously in the physical world which is abstracted form the objective event that one entity exerts external force on another entity to bring about changes in terms of position or state.Language,the result of concept and cognition certainly carries the output of concept.The causative construction reflects the corresponding causative event in language,thus being universal representation in human languages.Within the rationale of grammatical metonymy,the present research has conducted a comparison of the causative constructions in English and Chinese by adopting qualitative and quantitative analyses to the data selected from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Ordinary World.Specific research focuses on the operational models and motivations in English and Chinese causation under the influence of grammatical metonymy.The similarities and differences of the operational process of grammatical metonymy in English and Chinese causations are analyzed.The major findings of this investigation are listed in the following paragraphs.Firstly,the current study shows the types of causative construction in English and Chinese due to the operation of grammatical metonymy including nouns,adjectives and inserted verbs without causative force as predicates and subject changes in causation.Secondly,the research demonstrates in detail about the cognitive grammatical metonymic motivations of generating four types of English and Chinese causations by means of recategorization of word class or semantic coercion when the constructional meaning and the word meaning are in conflicts in forming causative constructions.Thirdly,the thesis contrasts similarities and differences of operational process of grammatical metonymy in each kind of English and Chinese causations.The similarity lies in that one type of grammatical metonymy can serve as the common cognitive base for both English and Chinese causations.However,the differences go to the unique grammatical metonymies respectively involved in English or Chinese causative construction.The current research contributes to the evidence that grammar is metonymic in essence because of the operation of grammatical metonymy.Furthermore,the study is of great importance in shedding some lights in grammar teaching of English and Chinese by offering a grammatical metonymic explanation to the predicate and subject in causation.