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Cognitive Chinese Grammar认知汉语语法 |
作者： |
张宁宁 著
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定价： |
30 元 |
页数： |
392页 |
ISBN： |
978-7-309-11424-9/H.2465
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字数： |
419千字 |
开本： |
32
开 |
装帧： |
平装 |
出版日期： |
2015年5月
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本类其他相关图书 |
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内容提要
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Preface
Three years of silent labor have finally come to fruition. My book is titled Cognitive Chinese Grammar, a name which indicates the subject matter as well as the theoretical guidance of this research, and which betrays the author’s ambition to emulate Cognitive English Grammar by Günter Radden and René Dirven. With this book I intend to reshape, or at least challenge, the conventional wisdom about grammar in general and Chinese grammar in particular, to demonstrate the potent descriptive-explanatory power of cognitive linguistics, and, hopefully, to introduce a modicum of applicability into the lofty, ivory-tower notion of theoretical linguistics.
Grammar, says the French dramatist Molière, governs even the kings. His quip more or less reflects the popular belief that grammar is something high above and mysterious, which prescribes rules of language and norms of communication. This popular (mis) belief, which finds its most powerful incarnation in the Chomskyan tradition, dissolves in the light of cognitive linguistics, as the latter draws instead on human cognition and adopts a bottom-up approach to language (as opposed to the top-down approach favored by the traditional theories). Cognitive linguists, myself included, hold that language taps into our cognitive abilities and thus can be described and explained in such terms. What we call “grammatical rules” are little more than entrenched linguistic patterns extracted from numerous real-world utterances in discourse contexts, not some overarching dictates which guard language use with jealous vigilance against ungrammaticality of whatever kind. Moreover, as a language is inseparable from the culture from which it emerged, and in which it grows, thrives and evolves, a cognitive linguistic investigation is thus at the same time a cultural study. In other words, language, culture and mind are united under the framework of cognitive linguistics.
Then what is the glue that keeps language, culture and mind stuck together? The answer is meaning, the notion of which in cognitive linguistics includes what are traditionally defined as semantics and pragmatics. Cognitive linguistic analysis, therefore, focuses first and foremost on the construction and expression of meaning, and on the pairing of form with meaning. For cognitive grammarians, grammatical explanation pretty much takes care of itself once analysis of meaning is taken care of.
There are, however, inherent difficulties for cognitive linguistic investigations, and methods for dealing with them might invite criticism from those who subscribe to traditional ideas. First, as cognitive linguistics posits no rigid boundary between grammatical and ungrammatical, thus cognitive grammatical analysis could risk criticism of imprecision. Second, the bottom-up approach suggests that description of the grammar of a particular language is not accomplished unless and until each and every linguistic item of it has been properly investigated. This means that cognitive grammatical analysis goes on indefinitely, since a language has countless linguistic items which vary slightly or significantly across the members of the speech community. Third, we do not have direct access to meaning construction which is a mental phenomenon, and this inaccessibility could be taken as adversely affecting the accuracy or even reliability of cognitive grammatical description.
These difficulties are real but not insurmountable. The blurry boundary between grammatical and ungrammatical does not require cognitive linguists to strike whenever ungrammaticality rears its head. Their primary task is to extrapolate the tendencies in language use, which allow for a certain degree of flexibility and vagueness, and yet which retain a potent power of prediction. The immense size and complexity of the repertoire of a natural language makes cognitive linguistic investigation not a mission impossible, but merely a mission ongoing. Anyway, a bottom-up approach by no means precludes the possibility or plausibility of positing higher-level, abstract linguistic constructs, except that this is often done in a “realistic” (see D?browska, 2004) as well as “minimalist” (see Taylor, 2013) fashion, that is, cognitive linguists posit linguistic constructs that are psychologically real and verifiable, keep their number to a minimum, and do not pull a construct out of their theoretical hats whenever the need arises to account for some apparently quirky phenomenon?—?linguistic constructs are the backbone of a theory, not stopgaps for theoretical leakage. The third difficulty will eventually be overcome by the development in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and for now, well-designed psycholinguistic experiments should be able to answer at least some of our immediate needs for evidence.
There used to be diametrically opposed opinions regarding Chinese grammar. One extreme, over-asserting the unique characteristics of the Chinese language, held that the Chinese language was not amenable to Western theories, and one must speak of Chinese grammar (if Chinese had a grammar at all) only at discourse level; whereas the other dogmatically followed the tradition of Western linguistics, indiscriminately imported theories of morphology, lexicology and syntax, and piously forced them upon the Chinese language. The contrast has now become less acute, but these lines of thinking still persist and prevail among Chinese linguists. Perhaps this is why cognitive linguistics has been receiving similar treatment since it got imported: it is either rejected as “unusable,” or applied with such haste that theoretical cohesion and detail get overlooked. As a consequence, the works of many self-anointed cognitive linguists show little depth of insight or consistency of theory.
My book therefore is likely to both inspire and outrage, as it is not intended as a compromise between the two extremes, but rises above them. Its primary objective is to dispel the myth, mystery and misconception surrounding Chinese grammar, and to showcase both the uniqueness of Chinese and its conformity with the linguistic theories which respect facts of language use and human cognition. The tremendousness of Chinese linguistic phenomena, and the bottom-up approach which I faithfully adopt, compel me to concentrate on only a few, albeit significant, grammatical patterns within the limited space of a single book. Moreover, almost each chapter in this book is in effect a collection of studies, for the bottom-up approach in cognitive linguistics requires both an extensive (and infinitely expanding) bottom and upward generalization, and it is thus incumbent on the acolyte to investigate as many phenomena and extract higher-up, unifying patterns out of seemingly diverse patterns.
However quixotic I may sound, Cognitive Chinese Grammar is only the first of many to come, each of which will focus on a particular cluster of linguistic phenomena. And I will venture a general theoretical framework for Chinese grammar when the “bottom” has become large and solid enough for a maximal generalization. But now we are of course several books away from that undertaking.
Zhang Ningning, at Fudan University
January 20th, 2015
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作者简介 |
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书摘 |
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Chapter One Introduction
Chapter Two Cognitive Chinese Grammar: A Framework
1.Cognitive Resources
2.A Cognitive-linguistic Perspective on Grammar
3.Academic Labeling
4.Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge
Chapter Three Instruments as Objects
1.Introduction
2.Definition of Instrument
3.Constraints on Instrument Objects
4.Summary
Chapter Four The Unlikely Objects of 吃 (Chī )
1.Introduction
2.A Classification of吃+Object Combinations
3.The Semantic Network of吃
4.The Productivity of the 吃+Object Construction
5.Summary and Discussion
Chapter Five The Bǎ (把)-Construction
1.Introduction
2.Previous Studies
3.An Anatomy of the bǎ-construction
4.The Semantic Characteristics of the Main Verb
5. The Semantic Characteristics of the Pre-posed Object
6.The Many Faces of the Result Element
7.The Semantic Characteristics of the Subject
8.Anomalous Instances of the bǎ-construction
9.The bǎ-construction and the Shǐ (使)-construction in
Comparison and Contrast
10. Summary and Discussion
Chapter Six Resultative Constructions
1.Introduction
2.Conceptual Motivations
3.The Make-up of Verb-result Structures
4.The Verb-copying Resultative Construction
5.The de (得)-resultative Construction
6.Directional Lexemes as Result Elements
7.Inversion in Resultatives
8.Summary
Chapter Seven The Double-Object Construction
1.Introduction: Settling the Dust
2.The Double-object Schema and Its Constructional Meaning
3.The Semantics of the Verb
4.The Curious Case of the “NP1+V+他+(Numeral) NP2”
Template
5.Pseudo-double-object Structures
6.Summary
Chapter Eight The Existential Construction
1.Introduction: Issues and Non-issues
2.The Chinese Existential Construction: An Anatomy
3.The Locative NP
4.The Predicate Verb
5.The Locatum NP
6.The Disappearance-emergence Construction
7.Summary and Discussion
Chapter Nine Nominal Predicates
1.Introduction
2.Patterns with Nominal Predicates
3. Cognitive Operations Behind Nominal-predicate Templates
4.“Inherently Predicative” NPs and Pattern (e)
5.Nouns Functioning as Adjectives
6.Summary and Discussion
Chapter Ten The Double-subject Construction
1.Introduction: A Delimitation
2.Aligning the Base and the Profile
3.Other Double-subject Constructions
4.Summary
Chapter Eleven The Bèi (被)-construction
1.Introduction
2.The Bèi-construction, a Sketch
3.The Patient-subject
4.The Nature of the Agent NP and the Predicate
5.The Newfangled Bèi-schema
6.Summary
Chapter Twelve Conclusion and Prospectus
References
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书评 |
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