1. Introduction

This paper reviews the historical research on Chinese form object constructions and explores the changes in syntactic, semantic, and cognitive features of adjectives based on the concept of "Xiang Jing Si Ci" in "Ma Shi Wen Tong". The form object construction is manifested in Chinese as an adjective followed by a noun element, such as "the way of university lies in Mingmingde". At the same time, the chapter also involves the study of English form object constructions, pointing out that adjectives can also be flexibly used as transitive verbs in English, forming the construction of "adjective+object". These constructions have dynamic meanings in semantics, such as "causing action", "intentional action", and "automatic" meanings. The complexity of form object constructions poses a challenge to language comprehension and acquisition, and has become a focus of research for scholars.

2. Research object

Focusing on the psychological form object construction, especially the semantic and pragmatic tendencies of psychological adjectives in both Chinese and English languages and their historical evolution. The study categorizes Chinese constructions into three types: causative, intentional, and automatic, while English is only classified as causative. Through Chinese English dictionary screening and literature data assistance, a total of 32 Chinese and 11 English adjectives were selected as research subjects. The research aims to quantitatively analyze the similarities and differences in the evolution of semantic types, syntactic features, logical semantic relationships, and pragmatic meanings between Chinese and English psychological form object constructions, and explore their cognitive motivations.

3. Research methods

This chapter introduces the research methods, including corpus collection and processing. The corpus comes from a self built Chinese English diachronic corpus, covering genres such as novels and poetry, with a time span of over two thousand years. The corpus size is basically balanced, with approximately 5 million words each in Chinese and English. Using PowerGrep 5 software to process text without part of speech tagging, directly using raw corpus. Retrieve the corpus using AntConc 3.5 software, filter out psychological form object constructions, and perform qualitative annotation. Two researchers annotated and the Kappa test showed a consistency of 0.784.

4. The Historical Evolution of Semantic Propensity in Chinese English Psychological Form Object Constructions

A detailed analysis was conducted on the historical evolution of the semantic and pragmatic meanings of Chinese and English psychological form object constructions. Research has found that the number of psychological adjectives in Chinese and English has undergone significant changes in different historical periods, with Chinese consistently having more adjectives than English. In terms of semantic orientation, both Chinese and English psychological form object constructions have undergone an evolution from causative to semantic and automatic meanings, but Chinese tends to lean towards semantic and automatic meanings, while English mainly focuses on causative meanings. In terms of pragmatic meaning, both Chinese and English psychological object constructions tend to express non neutral meanings, while Chinese tends to have negative meanings, while English shifts from negative meanings to positive meanings. In addition, the semantic orientation of Chinese psychological adjectives refers to both the object and the subject, while in English they only refer to the object. These findings reveal the similarities and differences in semantic and pragmatic meanings between the Chinese and English mental object constructions, providing a new perspective for understanding psychological expressions in both languages.

5. Cognitive rationale for the similarities and differences in semantic and pragmatic tendencies between Chinese and English psychological form object constructions

This paper explores the commonalities and differences in the semantic pragmatic tendencies of Chinese and English psychological form object constructions through subjective theory, attention hierarchy model, and pragmatic empathy theory. In terms of commonality, both Chinese and English psychological form object constructions have undergone an evolution from expressing people's psychological states to indicating that they possess psychological states, and their frequency of use has increased in modern times, reflecting the speaker's more subjective understanding. In terms of differences, the Chinese psychological form object construction has higher productivity, conveying different emotions and intentions of the speaker through different semantic types and attention levels. Chinese also achieves pragmatic empathy by changing word order, subject object relationships, using metonymy, and preferring non neutral meanings, making the pragmatic effect stronger and more subjective than English.

6. Conclusion

Through a longitudinal corpus analysis, the commonalities and differences in the evolution of semantic and pragmatic tendencies of Chinese and English psychological form object constructions were revealed. Chinese constructions have three semantic types, while English only has one, and Chinese is used more frequently. The semantic tendency of Chinese form object constructions is towards intentionality, and the frequency of automatic class usage has increased in modern times; The semantic meaning of English form object construction has always been causative, and its frequency of use has significantly increased in modern times. There are more psychological adjectives in Chinese than in English, with different meanings and directions. In terms of pragmatic meaning, both Chinese and English constructions tend to have non neutral meanings, while Chinese tends to have negative meanings, and English has evolved from negative to positive meanings. The article uses subjective theory, attention hierarchy model, and pragmatic empathy theory to explain these similarities and differences. Chinese subjectively describes psychological situations through ideation and automatic construction, while English objectively describes them through dynamic construction. The attention distribution of Chinese psychological form object construction speakers is wider, and their pragmatic empathy methods and effects are higher than those of English. Therefore, Chinese describes psychological situations more subjectively, while English describes them more objectively.