A Study On The Construction Of Schematic Representation Continuum For English Core Sentence Patterns And Their Cognitive Construals

English core sentence pattern is the most basic sentence type in English.The other sentence patterns are all transformed from the English core sentence patterns,so the English core sentence patterns become an important part of English learning and teaching.Traditional grammar defines the English basic sentence components and summarizes the types of English core sentence patterns.Quirk classifies English Core sentence patterns into seven types,which are SV,SVO,SVOO,SVC,SVOC,SVA and SVOA.Alexander,Huddleston & Pullum divide English core sentence patterns into five types: SV,SVC,SVO,SVOO,SVOC.Functional grammar analyzes English core sentence patterns from ideational,interpersonal and textual functions.Functional grammar pays attention to the specific contexts in which the English core sentence patterns are used.Traditional grammar and functional grammar lack the study on the intrinsic motivation of the formation of English core sentence patterns.In recent years,many cognitive linguists have adopted different cognitive models or conceptual frameworks to construe the corresponding relationship between human conceptual systems and syntactic structures.However,these theoretical models have a single level of analysis,or focusing on dynamic scenes and events,ignoring the description of static scenes.Based on previous studies,within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics,this paper adopts schema theory,category theory,trajector and landmark,windowing of attention,mental scanning and other construal operations to construct the schematic representation continuum for English core sentence patterns and have a cognitive construal for it.In the physical,mental and social world,English people constantly interact with various situations,after experiencing different kinds of situations,they form feeling,perception,image and then abstract the event schema for the construction of different sentence patterns.Based on previous scholars' research and classification on event schema,this paper divides event schemas into being schema,happening schema,moving schema,having schema,experiencing schema,doing schema,caused-motion schema and transferring schema.The main function of being schema is to describe the characteristics or conceptual category of an object;happening schema emphasizes a process that is taking place;moving schema describes the movement of an object in space and time;having schema reflects the possession relationship in the material world;experiencing schema describes the situations in the psychological world;doing schema arises from the interaction between participants;events described by the caused-motion schema have such a feature that a human being as an agent instigates a strong force that causes an entity to move;the transferring schema is used to describe the transfer of objects in the force-dynamic world.On the basis of these event schemas,human beings continue to carry out formal and symbolic cognitive operations,mapping the conceptual and structural features of different types of events into the corresponding sentence structures,thus achieving and expressing them in the English core sentence patterns.This process reflects the fundamental role of the real world in cognition and the formation of language.Therefore,the formation of English core sentence patterns not only reflects the imitation of events in the real world by human language,but also is influenced by the cognitive experience and subjective construe of the conceptualized subject.Based on the study of English core sentence patterns in traditional grammar,this paper adopts five types of English core sentence patterns: SV,SVC,SVO,SVOC and SVOO,which are classified by Alexander,Huddleston & Pullum and other scholars.Each event schema has its typical and atypical members.This paper will try to analyze the semantic differences between the typical and atypical members of each schema and their corresponding English core sentences from trajector and landmark,windowing of attention,mental scanning and other cognitive operations,so as to construct a schematic representation continuum of the English core sentence patterns within the framework of event schema.According to the construction of schematic representation continuum for English core sentence patterns,the research findings of this paper can be summarized as follows:Firstly,this paper attempts to use event schema to clarify the corresponding relationship between situations in the real life and language forms.Secondly,this paper manages to generalize the complex event schemas into eight categories: being schema,happening schema,moving schema,having schema,experiencing schema,doing schema,caused-motion schema and transferring schema.Thirdly,this paper explores the source of each event schema,as well as the typical and atypical members of each event schema.Fourthly,the author constructs a schematic representation continuum of English core sentence patterns within the framework of each event schema,and uses trajector and landmark,windowing of attention,mental scanning and other cognitive operations to construe it.Fifthly,the construction of semantic schema representation continuum of English core sentence patterns in the three cognitive spaces of the material world,the psychological world and the force-dynamic world finds a way to explore the relationship among reality,cognition and language.English core sentence patterns are the realization and expression of various event schemas in the real world at the linguistic level.Typical and atypical members of each event schema will correspond to different English core sentence patterns.Within the framework of event schema,different semantic representation forms of subject,predicate,object,complement in English core sentence patterns will construct the schematic representation continuum for English core sentence patterns.