A Study on Object-oriented Adverbials in Mandarin from a Cognitive Perspective

The ubiquity and elusive nature of object-oriented adverbials in Mandarin has been a heated topic of discussions in the Chinese linguistic community. Scholars analyzed the syntactic manifestations and semantic constraints of this phenomenon and placed Semantic Orientation Theory at the core of the researches. It is claimed that object-oriented adverbials originate from and can be converted back to be the attribute of the object. From a cognitive perspective, this paper argues that different sentence patterns are different cognitive gestalts and have different pragmatic and discourse functions. It is concluded that (1) there is no conversional relations between the adverbials and attributes even though they are both semantically related to the object; (2) object-oriented adverbial sentences and attributive sentences represent different kinds of cognitive construal, the former being dynamic and sequential while the latter being stative and holistic; (3) grammatical metonymy is the fundamental cognitive mechanism for the seemly mismatch of form and meaning language and the cognitive basis of the Semantic Orientation Theory founded by Chinese scholars.