Interchangeability In Representation Of Static And Dynamic Situations In English Syntax

Abstract

The paper looks into syntactic representation of static and dynamic situations in the English language. The representation of dynamic situations is exemplified by situations of uncontrollable action, whereas the static situations representation is demonstrated by situations of quality attribution. The utterances representing the static and dynamic situations in question have been analysed in terms of the syntactic structure and number of arguments. The analysis of utterances retrieved mainly from contemporary English literature has revealed a number of instances structured as static situations representing a dynamic one and vice versa. While both static and dynamic situations have prototypical means of syntactic representation in the English language, we have discovered that the syntactic models associated with static situations and those corresponding to dynamic situations can interchange. This study aims at identifying the cognitive mechanisms enabling the interchangeability of syntactic models corresponding to static and dynamic situations respectively, which in turn will help to shed light on basic conceptualization features of the situations in question. The findings presented in this paper demonstrate that static via dynamic and dynamic via static representations are possible due to conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy, which prove to be effective cognitive mechanisms that allow applying the syntactic models prototypically representing one situation to other situations.