Cognitive Grammar认知语法

A Brief Analysis on Cognitive GrammarIn recent years, the concept of “fictivity” has caught our attention more often and become a popular research topic in each study areas. And “Fictive motion” has been a common research topic of both cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics. Talmy first noticed the interesting and essential linguistic phenomenon and he thought that the language and the perception system have close relationship. According to Talmy, fictive motion verbs whose basic reference is to motion, but which actually describe stationary situations. One same object in sight has two different images, namely the actual one and the fictive and virtual one which is associated with cognitive ability. Other scholars also gave definitions to fictive motion. Langacker believes that fictive motion is a semantic transformation caused by human’s subjective construal on objective scene and a grammaticalization. In terms of our life experiences, the motion in fictive motion cannot take place. Let’s take these three sentences for example:(a)The balloon rose quickly.(b)The path rose quickly as we climbed.(c)The path rises quickly near the top.The first sentence is actual motion. The balloon can actually produce the movements “rise”. The second one is perfective virtual motion. The path makes a static scene and the object’s motion is realized by the sentence’s language forms virtually. As we know the path can’t motion itself. On account of the verb “rise”, the whole sentence could have the psychological fictive motion. The third sentence is inperfective virtual motion because the tense is the present tense and the motion didn’t finish.One of the first scholars who have dealt with fictive motion within the framework of cognitive linguistics is Leonard Talmy, who coined the term fictive motion in 1996. In order to account for this phenomenon, he proposed the pattern of general fictivity, a framework dealing with cognitive representation of nonveridical phenomena, especially form of motion. From his point of view, there exists a majorcognitive pattern: a discrepancy within the conceptualization of a single object. This discrepancy is between two different cognitive representations of the same entity, of which one representation is assessed to be more veridical than the other based on our general knowledge. On the other hand it’s important to note that these two discrepant representations of the same object are just alternative perspectives. Therefore, the conceptualizer needn’t have to experience any sense of contradiction or clash.Fictive motion constructions, in the view of conceptual metaphor theory, are licensed by the motion metaphor. They are regarded as particular linguistic instances of the conceptual metaphor whereby our understanding and verbalization of certain spacial scenes rest upon particular ways of moving. In other words, the locational use of motion patterns is explained as motivated by a conceptual metaphor where motion is mapped onto form or shape.There are lots of discussions about the interesting linguistic phenomenon. Talmy may have given the most elaborated discussion of it, in which he proposes a unified account of the cognitive representation of the nonveridical phenomenon. He points out that our cognitive systems (like language, reasoning and perception) share some fundamental properties. He proposes that there is a discrepancy between two different cognitive representations of a same entity, and the two representations are the products of the two different cognitive subsystems. He then characterized the two representations as the factive and fictive. The cognitive pattern of veridically unequal discrepant representations of the same entity in general, is called “general fictivity”. Under this pattern,there are several dimensions, one of which is the state of motion, in which the more veridical representation includes stationariness while the less veridical representation includes motion. The sentence like “The fence goes from the Plateau to the Valley” has two representations. The factive representation assumes that the fence is static, while the fictive representation assumes that the fence can move. Fictive here is adopted for its references to the imaginary capacity of human cognition, and fictive motion is to be considered as a linguistic phenomenon in which “the less palpable visual representation is generally of stationariness.”In other words, fiction motions verbs are those whose basic reference is to motion, but which actually describestationary things.Generally speaking, most studies are aiming at discussing the similarity between fictive motion and actual motion. Lakoff thinks that the metaphorical ability of thinking is a creative ability of thinking with human’s cognition processing. A man’s thinking is metaphorical essentially. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing or experience in terms of another. In the sentence “The path rose quickly as we climbed.”, the word “rise”should be used to express the meaning of upward movement. In fact it the verb’s real subject is humans. Humans can move upward instead of the static path. The study of metaphor can help explore the relationship between the objective external world and the brain thinking, therefore reveal the essential relationship between the external manifestation and inner sense.Talmy (2000) reckons the fictive motion as a special reflect of “overlapping systems”in cognitive system. One object has different authenticity in cognitive system. The higher one is called factive cognitive performance and the lower one is called fictive cognitive performance. We can often find fictive motion in our language. In fictive motion sentences, the real static scene virtualizes the object’s motion due to the use of motion verb. Let’s take another sentence for instance. “The road runs along the coast.” As the common sense, the road and the coast are both static but the the verb “Run” leads to a movement in cognition.Another important linguist who has devoted herself to the study of fictive motion in cognitive linguistics is Matlock. According to her studies, she argued that we construct mental models that resemble physical space and simulate movement of objects in this model in order to understand and process fictive motion expressions. She also argued that our ability to simulate motion motivate the use and behavior of fictive motion constructions, including what is generally seen as being linguistically acceptable. Matlock’s typology of fictive motion has been controversial. Some linguists argued that the distinction between bare motion verbs and manner motion verbs is not a determinant factor in the establishment of such a typology, since both types of verbs can appear in both types fictive motion constructions.Matlock has noted that the purpose of fictive motion is functional. Simulating themotion allows the language user to infer or convey the information about the physical layout of a scene. A fictive motion construction has the following constituents:subject noun phrase, motion verb, and either a prepositional phrase or a direct object. The subject noun phrase represents the trajector and the motion verb specifies a change in location. The prepositional object or direct object corresponds to a landmark or set of landmarks.Talmy’s account of fictive motion considers similarities between two cognitive systems:language and visual perception. The two discrepant representations of the same entity reveal a correspondence between the two systems, which implies that it cannot be too bold to say any linguistic example can have an analogue in a visual system. Talmy’s explanation is based on his general fictivity pattern, while other scholars analyze fictive motion from a different dimension, which brings dynamicity and subjectivity as fundamental elements in linguistic representation.Lakoff’s view though offering a seemingly sound account of the phenomenon in terms of metaphorical mappings, can not explain why fictive motion expressions generate certain inferences. For example, from The road runs along the coast, we can infer information about the spacial layout of the depicted layout: the road is near and parallel to the coastline. From The road winds through the mountain, we automatically conjure up a road that is long, narrow and winding. We don’t imagine a short and straight road. However, these inferences cannot arise only from the mappings between two domains.Matsumoto adopts the term “subjective motion”to refer to the phenomenon on discussion. He categorizes subjective motion expressions into two semantic types in the light of specificity of the motion involved. His classification aims to clarify the distinctions between English and Japanese fictive motion expressions rather than to pose a comprehensive framework of different categories of fictive motion in one particular language. As a result, it seems that the two-type classification ignores some specific values of the fictive motion expressions.Langacker’s view couldn’t account for these inferences either. Moreover, though accounting for fictive motion by mental scanning is reasonable, it’s very likely thatthis is only part of the story. The mental scanning may be parasitic on some other basic mental processes and serves as the final state of these processes which might be involved in processing fictive motion.The establishment of the cognitive grammar theory mainly gives a analysis and description to the relationship between semantics and symbols. This cognitive theory is much different from the linguistic theories in the past. The emergence of cognitive grammar signifies that the focus of the grammar study changes from form-focus to sense focus. Language is not a separate cognitive system and one’s linguistic competence has inseparable relationship with his general cognitive ability. The cognitive grammar offers an systematic and strict explanation of linguistic structure rather than a scrappy and arbitrary one, which makes great contribution in this respect.。