Abstract
The present paper attempts to look at Chinese resultative verb compounds form the perspective of cognitive relativism, namely through the contrastive study of Chinese and English verb-resultatives. Based on the comparison, the present thesis tries to explore the underlying conceptual approaches to structuring events consisting of both action and result by Chinese native speakers and English native speakers and show the discrepancies between them in cognition or more specifically, conceptualization of reality. Resultative verb compounds in Chinese are analyzed in terms of Talmy’s conceptual structure and are shown to present a problem for Talmy’s well-known typological dichotomy between "verb-framed" and "satellite-framed" languages. It is also argued that the so-called "resultative complement" in Chinese resultative verb compounds can be treated as the center of predication, even as the main verb. Pending further psycholinguistic evidence, it appears that Chinese speakers place relatively more emphasis on the result of an event, whereas English speakers more on the process of an event.
Highlights
Research BackgroundResultative constructions have been a hotly-debated topic in Chinese linguistics
This ontological relativity means that English speakers tend to attend relatively more to the process of an event, but, in contrast, Chinese relatively more to the result
According to Langacker, “if one language says I am cold, a second I have cold, and a third It is cold to me, these expressions differ semantically even though they refer to the same experience, for they employ different images to structure the same basic conceptual content” (1987: p. 47). He claimed that “meaning is language-specific to a considerable extent” and that “full universality of semantic structure cannot be presumed even on the assumption that human cognitive ability and experience are quite comparable across cultures.”. It appears that the impact of cognitive linguistics can be made stronger in the context of linguistic relativism and that cognitive linguistics can serve as a modern approach to linguistic relativity
Summary
The present paper attempts to look at Chinese resultative verb compounds form the perspective of cognitive relativism, namely through the contrastive study of Chinese and English verb-resultatives. The present thesis tries to explore the underlying conceptual approaches to structuring events consisting of both action and result by Chinese native speakers and English native speakers and show the discrepancies between them in cognition or conceptualization of reality. Resultative verb compounds in Chinese are analyzed in terms of Talmy’s conceptual structure and are shown to present a problem for Talmy’s well-known typological dichotomy between “verb-framed” and “satellite-framed” languages. It is argued that the so-called “resultative complement” in Chinese resultative verb compounds can be treated as the center of predication, even as the main verb.
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