A Study of "吃食堂" in the Perspective of Cognitive Grammar

The recent study of 吃食堂 in the perspective of cognitive grammar has focused on the analysis of its structural rationality and characteristics with a consideration of the cognitive shift in the psychological perception of the subject,which is inadequate.This paper reexamines 吃食堂from the perspective of lexical array and case checking in the recent theory of transformational-generative grammar and holds that case is not only for formal syntactical checking but also for semantic match checking.In languages like Chinese,because there is no formal case feature,loose semantic match can be allowed.Thus,those Chinese nouns semantically related to food can be used in the structure of eating.The paper also tentatively analyzes the semantic and syntactic features of Chinese VO with the help of cognitive grammar,construction grammar and transformational-generative grammar.