A Study Of Prototypical Meanings Of Simple Ergative Verbs In English And Chinese

Ergative verbs are both transitive and intransitive,whose subjects,when intransitive,correspond to their direct objects when transitive.In terms of syntactic form,they are manifested as the transformation from “NP1+V+NP2” to “NP2+V”.Semantically,they can realize causative-inchoative alternation.In short,ergative verbs are form-meaning pairings,displaying typological features and cross-linguistic comparative significance.Since Perlmutter put forward the Non-Objective Hypothesis in 1978,ergative verbs have been studied widely in linguistics.There are abundant achievements in the studies of ergative verbs,which mainly involve their definitions,morphologies,syntactic and semantic features.However,the prototypical meanings of ergative verbs,especially simple ones,still remain largely unexplored,and the corpus-based studies are also waiting for further verification.Therefore,targeting English and Chinese simple ergative verbs,this thesis attempts to explore their prototypical semantic meanings from the prototype theory and force dynamic casual theory,further revealing the cognitive causes affecting their similarities and differences between English and Chinese.In order to reveal the prototypical meanings and relevant issues of English and Chinese simple ergative verbs thoroughly,a few questions will be explored.First,what are the prototypical meanings of simple ergative verbs in English and Chinese? Second,what are the extended semantics of English and Chinese simple ergative verbs and their cognitive mechanisms? Meanwhile,some cognitive reasons are also explored to reveal their primary impact on the semantic characterizations of English and Chinese simple ergative verbs.Through the statistical investigation and qualitative illustration,some major findings are summarized as follows:First of all,English and Chinese simple ergative verbs are similar in prototypical semantics.They are all characterized as state change and forces between participants.Moreover,from the perspective of aspectual and casual structures,the typical English and Chinese ergative verbs mainly feature the prototypical meanings that conceptualizes(Type1)the punctual achievement of directed change and(Type 2)the durative accomplishment of directed change.In the category of English and Chinese simple ergative verbs,the status of members is not equal,constituting prototypes and non-prototypes.The semantic characterizations of prototypes and non-prototypes gradually decrease and present acontinuum relationship.Typical members such as“open”in“He opened a door”and ting(停)in停船后,大家过来笑着举手致敬possess the most typical semantic characterization,while periphery members such as“march”in“The victors marched 50captive soldiers”and zui(醉)in一大束红玫瑰香气醉人satisfy the least prototypical semantic characterization.From the typical to the atypical,the semantic characterizations among members show a continuum relationship.Secondly,the extended semantics of simple ergative verbs in English and Chinese,as well as their cognitive mechanism,is motivated by the economical principle of language and cognitive metonymy selection.In other words,when people want to emphasize the process,the transitive structure of simple ergative verbs comes into use.When the result is emphasized,the intransitive structure is selected.In addition,although there is no agent in the intransitive structure and the event looks as if it happens independently,the existence of the agent is known to all.In fact,it is the least-effort principle that motivates the adjustment of semantic profiling of simple ergative verbs,which further leads to the alternation.Finally,this paper argues that the main semantic differences between English and Chinese simple ergative verbs lie in the distinct construals of events in terms of TIME-SPACE and PROCESS-RESULT,which are also affected by the specific argument structure constructions.The typical or prototypical argument structure constructions of English and Chinese simple ergative verbs,just like their prototypical meanings and extended semantics,exhibit the alternating dependency between“NP1+V+NP2”and“NP2+V”,while the non-prototypical ones differs in a few aspects.In a nutshell,the cognitive exploration into the prototypical meanings of English and Chinese simple ergative verbs sheds light on the conceptual similarities and differences of two language users,which are deeply rooted in their embodied experience of event structures that include their construals of TIME-SPACE and PROCESS-RESULT.The current research is of great significance to the linguistic typology in terms of the conceptualization of maximally individual events encoded in the simple verbs,along with the empirical contributions to the language learning and teaching.In this way,further studies are expected to carried out to reveal more insights into the simple ergative verbs from the empirical perspective.