Abstract

With various collocations of the Chinese verb “chi (eat)”, the paper deals with irregular phenomena from a cognitive perspective. With the cognitive frame of a verb, a set of inter-related popular concepts have been provided for various collocations. Cognitive principles function together for the realization of these concepts on the syntactic level. These principles entitle various concepts with different degrees of prominence, which leads to various syntactic statuses. Generally speaking, when transferred to linguistic expressions, the agent becomes the subject, the patient the object, and other concepts various adverbials. Nevertheless, extra prominence may be given to some concepts, as the speaker may want to fulfill particular needs in communication. As a result, the original prominence scalar is disordered, and what follows is the rearrangement of their syntactic statuses, which finally results in an ungrammatical sentence pattern.

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