A Study Of Conceptualization And Its Motivations Of English Middle Construction

As a special language form,English Middle Construction has become the focus of language research due to its unique syntactic and semantic features.Scholars and linguists at home and abroad have made numerous studies from different perspectives such as transformational generative grammar,cognitive linguistics,and cross-language comparison,which provides valid reference values for further studies.At present,domestic researches mainly concentrate on the restrictions or semantic and syntactic characteristics of English Middle Construction based on cognitive theory.But few scholars conduct a comprehensive and systematic study on the conceptualization of English Middle Construction.Based on above findings,this thesis intends to study the conceptualization and its motivations of “NP+V+Adv” English Middle Construction within the framework of Langacker’s Construal Theory and Talmy’s Force Dynamic Theory.There are two research questions in this thesis.(1)How is “NP+V+Adv”English Middle Construction semantically conceptualized?(2)What are the motivations of the conceptualization?As for above two questions,the following findings can be concluded in this thesis.Firstly,“NP+V+Adv” English Middle Construction has the cognitive base,which consists of affordance and cognitive modality.The key point of affordance is the relationship between organisms and environment which corresponds to the interaction between human and the outside world.Thus it reveals the connections between cognitive subject and the attribute of the external thing.The interactive experience between cognitive subject and the external thing can be expressed by language form with modal meaning through the subjective process of the speaker,which has great impacts on the form and meaning of the construction.Secondly,the conceptualization of“NP+V+Adv” English Middle Construction involves three steps,which are the prominence of argument structure,the activation of compound event structure,and the metonymic coercion of compound event result.The asymmetry between non-agentive subject and implicit agent in argument structure corresponds to the relationship between prominence and background in construal theory.The cognitive processes of prominence and implication involve the operation of agonist demotion.What’s more,the relationship between prominence and background explains the formation of the state event and the action event in “NP+V+Adv” English Middle Construction.The state event describes the attribute of the entity,and the action event expresses the action result.In addition,the resolution of semantic conflicts between the state meaning and the action meaning can be achieved through metonymic coercion,thus reaching semantic accordance.Finally,the motivations of the conceptualization of “NP+V+ Adv”English Middle Construction mainly includes the subjectivity of the speaker,the economy and iconicity of the language,and the social culture.For the main contributions of this thesis: in theory,this thesis deeply explores the conceptualization and its motivations of “NP+V+ Adv” English Middle Construction based on Constual Theory and Force Dynamic Theory,which will not only enriches the application of these two theories,but also expands the scope of the study of this kind of construction.In practice,this thesis provides reasonable cognitive explanations for the interactive relationship between the form and meaning of “NP+V+Adv” English Middle Construction,which is conductive to studying middle constructions and other relative constructions for English learners.So it can promote the development of English teaching.In the meanwhile,this thesis can assist people in grasping the information focus and author’s intention in communication or discourse accurately,so as to improve the usage frequency of English Middle Construction.