文档介绍：A COGNITIVE STUDY OF THE CLEFT
CONSTRUCTIONS
BY
Zhao Guangying

Under the supervision of
Dr. Hu Jian

A thesis
submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts to the School of Foreign Studies
Anhui University

April 2009
Acknowledgements
I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to those
who have helped me to plish this thesis.
First and foremost, my deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Dr. Hu Jian,
who instilled me a real interest in linguistics, cognitive linguistics in particular. I
benefited profoundly from her enlightenment: her lectures during my three-year
study as a postgraduate student, her scholarly guidance and constant encouragement
to me, and her critical and careful reading of my thesis. Undoubtedly, without her
supervision and inspiring criticism, this thesis could not e into being.
I should also express my heartfelt thanks to all the other professors who have
taught and helped me in my postgraduate studies at Anhui University, especially to
Prof. Zhu Yue, Prof. Zhou Fangzhu, Prof. Zhang Ming, Prof. Hua Quankun, Prof.
Zhu Xiaomei, Dr. Yang Ling and Dr. Zhang Hongxia, for their help and advice.
In addition, my thanks also go to my dear friends and classmates, who have
encouraged me all the time, given me some suggestions in the process of writing this
thesis.
Last but not least, I want to thank my family for their support and
encouragement for all these years.

i
Abstract

This thesis is intended to bring the Construction Grammar and the
Figure-Ground theory into the cognitive analysis of the cleft constructions and tries
to prove the cleft structures to be the constructions—pairs of form and function, to
explore the cognitive explanation of the semantic and syntactic properties of the
matrix clause and the relative clause in the cleft constructions