A Cognitive Analysis Of The English Sentence With Inanimate Time Subject-Theoretical Insights From The Canonical Event Model

The English sentence with inanimate subject is a unique and intriguing linguistic phenomenon,the basic structure of which is composed of inanimate subject and conscious verb.Based on this,the English sentence with inanimate time subject,as its major branch,is of great researching value.In previous research,little has been done to analyze the cognitive mechanism and motivations behind this phenomenon.This thesis will elaborate on this point.This research firstly uses the iWeb Corpus to collect and analyze the linguistic data so as to get the common collocations of inanimate time subject with the highest frequency.Secondly,the author revises the original canonical event model according to the usage of the structure of inanimate time subject and uses the revised model to conduct the analysis.This research focuses on the linguistic data of the five basic conscious verbs take,give,make,come and go to explain the operational mechanism of this sentence structure.Lastly,the author explores the inherent nature of inanimate time subject sentences and the motivations of using this structure.The findings of this research are listed as follows:Firstly,major types of inanimate time subject sentences and their basic cognitive mechanism are elaborated with the use of the Revised Canonical Event Model based on the 5 basic conscious verbs of "give","take","make","come" and "go".Due to the fact that every event involves participants and the number of participants can reflect the process of energy transmission and how the time acts as the source of energy transmission,the author selects the number of participants as the benchmark to classify the linguistic data of the five basic conscious verbs.The results show that the linguistic data featuring "give","take" and"make" can respectively be classified into two types while those featuring "come" and "go"respectively have only one type.Secondly,the immediate motivations of inanimate time subject sentence are explored:the mechanism of Reference Point and that of construction coercion.The former takes the element of time as the reference point so as to facilitate understanding of the target of event in the framework,making the time as the salient element in the subject position.The latter solves the conflict between the lexical meaning of time and syntactic structure of inanimate time subject sentence.When the inanimate lexical meaning of time does not fit into the syntactic structure of "Somebody Consciously Does Something",the syntactic structure gains the upper hand,coercing the lexical meaning of the time subject to act as an animate being,thus able to transfer energy.Thirdly,a comparison of Chinese and English regarding the usage of inanimate time subject sentence is done.Based on the results from the data collection,the author examined the number of sentences that can be successfully translated to Chinese without basically changing their inanimate time subjects and conscious verbs.The results show that the use of set phrases such as "take a toll on","take up","take down" and "take on" constitutes the main reason for unsuccessful translation.Fourthly,the ultimate motivations of inanimate time subject sentences are clarified:the conceptual metaphor theory and the embodied philosophy.In daily life,we experience events and use our senses to perceive those events.We understand that it is the animate being that initiates action,which happens in a period of time.Therefore,we often use the element of time to locate events.Due to the importance of time in locating events,our mental faculty reacts to our physical experience and profile the time.Also,language itself is the reflection of our cognitive faculty and embodied experience and so we express what we have gained in physical experience with the time as the subject.This embodiment process also shows that inanimate time subject sentence is a universal phenomenon in all languages.What makes it different from one language to another has nothing to do with our general experience,but has much to do with some specific linguistic features,such as some set phrases related to conscious verb.