A Cognitive Approach to the Meanings of the English Definite Article THE

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the English definite article under the framework of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991a, 1991b, 2000). In the first place, I focused on the concept ‘cognitive domain’ proposed by Langacker (1987:147-182). According to the concept, almost all of the human speech acts can be conceptualized and schematized in human being’s cognitive domain. In order to facilitate the discussion of the data used in this paper, I employed some terminologies of my own creating. One of them is ‘cognitive bridge’. ‘Cognitive bridge’ is constructed by the speaker and then is built on the hearer’s cognitive domain. Its first role is to be used as a cognitive setting in which ‘the’ can be naturally used. In the middle of this paper, the scope of ‘cognitive bridge’ is enlarged to ‘speaker and hearer’s cognitive domain’, and later on, it can even be expanded to the marginal line of human being’s cognitive domain, finally leaving only ‘psychological boundary’ surrounding ‘the’. As the conceptualized or crystallized meaning in CG can be placed on the very top of every possible linguistic output, so the newly established superschema of 'the' in this paper will play the role of a so called central circuit of different usages of ‘the’.