A Study On The Construction Of Semantic Representation Continuum For English Non-finite Verbs

The verb is the indispensable core part of speech,which is the important carrier of human cognition and consciousness.The abundant potential meanings and flexible form of the verb drives it to be the focus and difficulty of language acquisition.Verb belongs to the open-class words which is a kind of typical representation of the conceptual content system in language.As far as this study concerned,the verb is a category which is used to describe various situations in physical world,mental world and social world,indicating action or state of things in the objective world,and almost every complete sentence has a verb.All the time the scholars and linguistic theories of different schools show great interest in verbs.The non-finite verb is a special form of a verb,which cannot be used as the predicate of a sentence alone.Thus,it is also called a non-predicate verb,including infinitive phrase,participle(present participle and past participle)and gerund.Due to its flexible forms and complicated functions,the non-finite verbs are always difficult to grasp.It is necessary to study the semantic representation properties and patterns of the non-finite verbs.This thesis tries to use the construal methods in the perspective of cognitive linguistics to analyze the semantic features of the different English non-finite verb forms,attempting to find the profiling attributes of them and the corresponding situations they describe.What’s more,this paper discovers the semantic scales between them by analyzing the non-finite verb forms as the same sentence constituent and finally construct a unified semantic representation continuum based on their cognitive nature and semantic features.According to Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar,the reason for the different images of the same situation is decided by four parameters: selection,perspective,salience and specificity.And on the basis of the four parameters,this thesis selects five major construal methods to give a cognitive description of the non-finite verbs,which are viewing frame,specificity vs.generality,mental scanning,subjectivity vs.objectivity,and windowing of attention.By the means of cognitive construal,the semantic scales between the different non-finite verbs in the same syntactic position will show.The fundamental principle of the continuum depends on the properties of word classes,which means that the non-finite verbs function between the nouns and verbs and have the properties of both.Because of the nature of the non-finite verbs,they do not indicate any temporal relations,and they can only designate atemporal relations.Through the analysis and summary of the study on English non-finite verbs,the findings of this paper can be summarized as the following aspects:Firstly,in terms of the infinitive phrase,its major function is to represent the future events,which means that compressing the specific action or event that has not happened yet.It usually denotes the subjective action of the speaker or subject,and has strong verbal attributes.Secondly,as to the gerund,it represents the recurring events or some habitual actions,and has a sense of objective fact.It possesses strong generality and abstractness,mainly profiling nominal attributes.The gerund,together with the infinitive phrase is at the both ends of the continuum.Thirdly,compared with the infinitive phrase and gerund,the participle locates in the middle position of the continuum,and mainly profile adjective or adverb attributes.The major function is modifying things or relations.When modifying a thing,they profile the inherent qualities and states;and when modifying a relation,they represent the sub-events or additional action and states of a situation,which also provide the background information of the main event.Fourthly,under the theoretical frame of Cognitive Grammar,the main function of the non-finite verbs is to profile the “thingness” and atemporal relations.The non-finite verb has a prominent function of compression as a verb form indicating atemporal relations.It is a kind of constringent representation which describes the relationship between events,and in normal case we can transform the non-finite verb forms into a clause.The non-finite verb is a flexible and efficient representation inventory of already&possible,active&passive,dynamic&static relations.People tend to select the most compatible language forms to realize the different expression of the main events and sub-events according to the participants and the interrelationship of them.Via this study,we can see that the various usages of non-finite verbs reflect the flexibility and efficiency of English.The non-finite verb forms represent the actions,events and situations which are additional to the predicate verb,the coexistence relationship between two types of verbs embody the linguistic expression’s harmony and unity.This paper is made up of five chapters.Chapter one is the introduction of this paper.It introduces the research background,purpose and significance,research method and frames of this study.Chapter two is the literature review part of this thesis.Chapter three is the theoretical basis of this thesis.Chapter four is the core chapter of this paper.It starts from the semantic representation of the non-finite verbs,with the aid of different construal methods studying the non-finite verbs’ semantic access,and summarizes the semantic differences in different forms of non-finite verbs and the motivations behind them,at last,construct a semantic representation continuum for the English non-finite verbs.Chapter five summarizes the contents of the paper.It concludes the major findings of this study and points out the limitations of this paper.