Cognitive Grammar认知语法

A Brief Analysis on Cognitive Grammar

In 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 major

cognitive 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 describe