A Contrastive Cognitive Study On English And Chinese Complex Sentences Under A Theoretical Framework Of Figure-ground Theory

Cognitive linguistics believes that there is a mapping process between linguistic form and the physical world,and the word order can be regarded as one of the linguistic representations of the cognitive procedure.However,this process is subject to human cognitive mechanism and cognitive operation.The fixity and flexibility of word order in English and Chinese complex sentences provide a contrastive research basis regarding the adopted sequence and the syntactic structures.Given this,this study adopts a combination of a qualitative and a quantitative research methods and conducts a contrastive cognitive study under the theoretical framework of Figure-Ground theory in order to analyze the Figure and Ground order in the five types of English and Chinese complex sentences.They are temporal complex sentences,conditional complex sentences,cause-effect complex sentences,concessive complex sentences and purpose complex sentences selected according to the Cognitive Principles proposed by Talmy(2000).The specific research contents are summarized in the following three aspects.Firstly,this thesis summarizes the prototypical and extended constructions of five types of English and Chinese complex sentences.Secondly,it analyzes the distribution of Figure and Ground of these types of complex sentences.Thirdly,this study reveals the underlying cognitive mechanisms behind the similarities and differences of these complex sentences in English and Chinese.The prototypical and extended constructions of these five types of English and Chinese complex sentences are summarized in terms of syntactic characteristics.Furthermore,this thesis further explores the inserted schemas and the ways of decoding connectives that have been found in both English and Chinese extended constructions.Based on the cognitive interpretation,it is proposed that various semantic logical relationship embedded in different types of complex sentences exerts their effect on the sanction to the inserted schemas.Finally,a continuum comprising these five types of complex sentences is established according to their different degrees of sanction to understand the commonality of inserted schemas better.It is also found that Chinese extended constructions have stronger flexibility and diversification than those extended constructions in English.In addition,there are also significant differences in the order of Figure and Ground,especially in temporal,conditional and cause-effect complex sentences,because English complex sentences show the distribution order of “Figure-Ground”,while Chinese complex sentences mostly prefer the “Ground-Figure” order.On the basis of quantitative data from corpora,this research further analyzes the underlying cognitive mechanisms behind the similarities and differences with some typical examples in terms of the parameters of cognitive operations,such as salience,perspectives and subjectivity.The results show that the order of “Figure-Ground” is embedded with a stronger degree of subjectivity because its cognitive perspective is contrary to the sequence of objective events.Therefore,this order has stronger psychological prominence at the cognitive level.Reversely,the “Ground-Figure” order accounts for a higher proportion in Chinese complex sentences.Because it conforms to the sequence of objective events,its semantic objectivity is higher than the former.Additionally,in the conversion process from “Ground-Figure” order to “Figure-Ground” order,an objective construal is shifted to a subjective construal.Moreover,the profile of the objective relationship between described events in the main clause and the subordinate clause is changed into the subjective relationship between the conceptualizer and the objective relationship denoted by the complex sentence,and this process is called “subjectivization”.Under the theoretical framework of Figure-Ground theory,this contrastive cognitive study has explored the similarities and differences of Figure and Ground order in five types of English and Chinese complex sentences.In particular,this study presents an account for cognitive mechanism behind the similarities and differences,throwing some light on further studies on complex sentences,as well as teaching Chinese as a foreign language and translation studies.