A Cognitive Constrastive Study Of Inchoative Verbs Between English And Chinese

Verbs refer to actions or states in human communications,in which they signify events or resultatives.Inchoative verb is one group of verbs that describes or represents inchoative actions or processes of events.Their essential function is to demonstrate a change of state,exhibiting transition from one state to another.At home and abroad,it is different on the focus of inchoative verb.Domestic scholars focus on the co-occurrence and collocation of inchoative verb and directional verb,like“V qi lai”(起来)construction.Foreign scholars study the syntactic and semantic features of inchoative verbs from the perspective of language and cognition.Therefore,the linguistic community pays insufficient attention to the internal conceptual structure of inchoative verb,and lacks using corpus in the research.Although studying inchoative aspect like“V qi lai”(起来)can reflect some grammatical features to some extent;the intrinsic attributes will be determined by the property of inchoative verbs.This thesis uses the corpus as the method in the research.The corpus-based analysis method is an important supplement to the traditional rule-based analysis language method.Because all cognition of human comes from people’s feeling and experience of the world.This thesis mainly selects four Chinese inchoative verbs with human body parts as the object to contrast with English inchoative verbs.In the course of the research,the thesis uses two corpora: Contemporary Chinese corpus of the National Commission and Corpus of Contemporary American English,which is short for COCA.By logging into two corpus websites,search the selected words,get a large number of examples and collect the data.Upon different researches made at home and abroad,the thesis selects eight inchoative verbs in English and Chinese as a study subject,using corpus for making contrasts in terms of semantics,pragmatics and syntax,so as to figure out their intrinsic attributes,semantic motivations and socio-cultural context.