Cognitive Semantics Study Of The Verb-directional Construction "V Lai" From The Perspective Of Macro-event

As a linguistic phenomenon that characterizes the basic spatial and bodily experience of human beings,verb-directional construction has received much attention from the field of linguistics.Driven by many scholars,and guided by the theories of cognitive linguistics,such as conceptual metaphor,image schema,conceptual structure,etc.,the semantic research of verb-directional construction is deepening and has made some achievements.As one of the typical verb-directional construction,“V lai” has also been deeply studied by many scholars,but there are still disputes about its path of semantic extension and the classification of the semantic type of “V lai” is not accurate enough,leading to its directional meaning being too generalized.The verb-directional construction “V lai” is the research object of this thesis,which is based on the theoretical framework of marco-event in cognitive semantics,aiming to investigate the following three questions:(1)How many types of macro-event does the verb-directional construction “V lai”represent and what are the semantic features of “V lai” in different types of macro-event?(2)What are the cognitive mechanisms behind the semantic extension of the verb-directional construction “V lai”? How do they operate respectively?(3)Is there any special usage of “V lai’ independent of the macro-event?Based on the data collected from A Comprehensive Grammar Account of Directional Complements(《趋向补语通释》)and BLUC Chinese Corpus,this thesis first investigates the types of macro-event represented by“V lai”and its semantic features from the perspective of macro-event theory.Then,the cognitive mechanism behind the semantic expansion of“V lai”between different types of macro-event is discussed under the help of conceptual metaphor and metaphtonymy.Finally,it explores the special semantic usage of“V lai”from the collected corpus,aiming to make a more comprehensive explanation of the semantics of“V lai”.Through the analysis of the collected corpus,the following conclusions are drawn from this thesis:(1)At the semantic level,the semantics of the verb-directional construction “V lai”can be divided into directional meaning,temporal meaning,state change meaning and realization meaning pertaining to motion event,temporal contouring event,state change event and realization event respectively.Then,the directional verb “lai” as a satellite of the verb-directional construction “V lai”,expresses the concept of path in motion event,the duration of action in temporal contouring event,the result after the change of state in state change event and the realization or confirmation of the agent’s intention in realization event.(2)The cognitive mechanisms of the semantic extension of the polysemous verb-directional construction “V lai” are conceptual metaphor and conceptual metaphtonymy.Specifically,the directional meaning represented by motion event is prototypical meaning.Under the conceptual metaphtonymy mechanism,the directional meaning is extended to the state change meaning,and under the conceptual metaphor mechanism,the directional meaning is extended to the temporal meaning and the realization meaning.(3)The semantics of verb-directional construction “V lai” is not limited to the four types of macro-event,but also contains two semantic usages with a higher degree of grammaticalization.First,“lai” can be used as a purposive marker in the serial verb construction “V lai VP”,which leads to the purpose expressed by the verb.In addition,“lai” can be a discourse marker with textual function,which expresses inference,attitude or comment of the agent on something,so it is highly subjective and grammaticalized.To sum up,by exploring the semantic features of the macro-event that the verb-directional construction “V lai” characterizes as well as the cognitive mechanisms of its semantic extension and finding out two types of semantic usages of “V lai”independent of the macro-event,this thesis expands the research scope of macro-event and deepens the semantic research of the verb-directional construction,providing a new perspective for the comprehensive semantic interpretation of the verb-directional construction “V lai”.