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Analyzing the Complex Sentences from the Figure-Ground TheoryAbstract: The figure-ground theory and view of prominence are important components in cognitive linguistics, and they are useful to analyze the complicated structures. Based on that, this paper tries to discuss its function in syntactic analysis of English complex sentences (e.g. the cleft construction, the reversed or passive clauses) and clarify how they can explain the diversity and prominence systematically.Key words: figure-ground theory, prominence, complex sentence I. IntroductionAccording to Ungerer & Schmid, cognitive linguistics is a significant approach to language that is based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it. Cognitive linguistics mainly adopts the following three views to study language: experiential view, attentional view and prominence view. Experiential view argues for the description of one entity, and it is not limited from objective aspect, but also provides more meaningful and natural description including metaphor; attentional view argues that what we actually express reflects which parts of an event attract our attention; prominence view argues that the information in a clause is selected and arranged according to the degree of prominence, and the construction of the sentence is determined by how the cognitive model deals with the prominent degree of information; e.g. considering the situation that one truck hits the tree, the sentence The truck crashed into the tree is conceived to be more natural than sentence The tree was hit by the truck, because the moving truck is treated as more important in humans cognitive processing7.II. The Figure-Ground TheoryIn reference to the prominence principle, figure-ground theory is regarded as one of the representative denoting cognitive models. It was first introduced into psychology by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin almost a century ago and later integrated into the more comprehensive perceptual organization framework by the gestalt psychologists 6.Ungerer and Schmid explain that when observing the spatial relation of two objects, people tend to take one object as the focus of attention, and the other as the reference or background. The focus of attention is usually called “figure”, the reference is regarded as “ground” 7.A good case in point is the well-known face-vase illusion. When the background is seen as black, the vase is prominent. The backdrop being white, the outline of two faces comes out, formulated as the figure this time. We have two possibilities of perceiving the picture, either as faces or as a vase, but we can only see one at a time. Still, we can easily switch between the two ways of looking at the picture especially after longer inspection. What lies behind our inability to see both the vase and the faces at the same time is the phenomenon that is called figure-ground theory 5.In order to determine figure and ground efficiently, it is useful to follow the principle of prgnanze. It is composed of a series of formula that are faithful reflections of humans visual processing, and plays a major part in selecting which part has the priority to become the figure4. That is to say, figure is always the object with complete form or shape and is comparatively small, dynamic and easy to move; besides this, the figure has structure and coherence whereas the ground is viewed as unstructured, shapeless and uniform so that figure is more likely to be identified and remembered, and to be associated with meaning, feeling, and aesthetic values6.In the example “the book is on the table”, the book readily fulfills the principle as smaller and easier to move than the table, so it is regarded as the figure and the table as the ground.III. Analyzing the Complex Sentences with Figure-Ground TheoryIn the figure-ground theory, the intrinsic characteristics of ground are embodied in the fact that it serves as the referent point with the purpose of clarifying the unknown features of the figure, while the figure possesses the temporal and spatial features to be determined and clarified 5.Based on this, we can reach the conclusion that ground transfers the known information, and the figure is the embodiment of “new” information.1. InversionIn the linguistic analysis, figure is the object which will be described and it is more salient, while ground is the environment which is less salient in cognition. The cognitive model of “figure-ground” tells us that, in inversion, when the ground appears first, it will attract the hearers attention and when the figure finally appears, it will attract hearers more attention because the hearers spend more time and energy in noticing figure3. Compared with ground, figure gets more obvious and longer attention: after all, figure is the one which the speaker wants the hearer to know and wishes to put the hearers focus on and of course, figure is also the one the hearer is eager to know. Lets compare the two sentences:a. Mike was in front of me.b. In front of me was Mike.The first sentence gives us the details about Mikes and my location with the sequential order. But the second sentence is a full inversion. “In front of me” as the known information, is the ground while “Mike” is figure which is located in focus, making him prominent. In a word, inversion as the realization of “ground-before-figure” (GbF) model, can be used as a device to interest hearers: through the movement of the subject and the compliment, the figure (subject) of the unmarked sentence becomes as the marked figure and the unmarked sentence gets the dynamic quality and becomes as the marked, which directs the hearers focus on the marked figure during the process 3.The GbF model 1 is formulated as follows: There are times when a speaker wants her hearer to locate and/or pay attention to an entity (figure) in a location (ground), but the hearer does not know the existence of that figure in the ground. So the speaker presents the ground first by anchoring it with a landmark that is established most often in the previous linguistic context and sometimes in the discourse context. This order of figure-ground presentation invites the hearer to search the ground in order to locate and/or to focus on the figure.1. Basis: the gestalt of figure and ground2. Conditions: A. Ground is anchorable; B. Figure is not known to the hearer as present in the ground.3. Purposes: To anchor the ground with a landmark known to the hearer, which is often done for the purpose of helping he hearer to locate the figure and/or drawing her attention to it. 4. Result: Increase focus of attention on figure and ground. Regarding Condition A, the model states that the ground should be anchorable with a landmark that is established “most often in the previous linguistic context or sometimes in the discourse context.” “Previous linguistic context” refers to what has been said before, and “discourse context” refers to the shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer engaged in a particular type of discourse. This shared knowledge may fall into two kinds: general knowledge about the world and specific knowledge about a particular genre of the discourse 5. Condition B states that “figure is not known to the hearer as existing in the ground”, not that “figure is not known to the hearer”. When we say that something is known to the hearer, we generally mean that the hearer is aware of the existence of or the identity of that something. But as the condition states, the hearer doesnt assume the speakers existence 5. Consequently, the purpose of the GbF model, particularly inversion is mainly to increase focus on figure more than ground. Because of the reversed movement of the subject and complement, the unmarked sentence becomes the marked one and the figure will invariably be focused. 2. Cleft ConstructionEnglish cleft construction is a special kind of sentences which has two clauses with its own finite verb, so as to place emphasis on a particular element by a focus marker. The basic structure of the construction is “It be that/who ”, in which “It be ”clause is the main clause, and “that/ who” is the embedded clause. It marks the focus by a copular verb “be”, and the focused constituent is closely behind the copular verb 2. Lets analyze the following four sentences:a. John broke his neighbors window yesterday.b. It is the neighbors window that John broke yesterday.c. It is yesterday that John broke his neighbors window.d. It is John who broke the neighbors window yesterday.The declarative sentence describes the whole situation-when, what happened to whom, as the ground. Unlike sentence a, the sentences (b, c and d) act as the cleft construction with “it” an empty subject. It divides the complete sentence into two parts, making them discontinuous and closed and creates a new focus as the figure. According to the figure-ground theory, in the sentence b, “the neighbors window” as the new information and the focus of the event, emphasizing what John broke; in the sentence c, “yesterday” stresses when the event happened and stands out from the reminder to be the figure; in the last sentence, the subject “John” is the prominent figure while the thing is the ground. From the above analyses, it is the figure-ground theory that is helpful to understand the cleft sentences with the marked information, especially what is important and what the secondary subplot is.3. Passive SentencesThe choice between an active sentence and its passive equivalent can be exploited in English to mark information structure. Compare the following sentences:a. Bureaucrats could easily store and retrieve data about the citizenry.b. Data about the citizenry could easily be stored and retrieved by bureaucrats.Of these two sentences, both of which can represent the same situation. The first sentence is active with the subject as the agent and the object the patient, while the other is passive. The patient is put ahead and become the marked information, with “data about the citizenry” being the figure and the whole description as the ground from the figure-ground theory 9. In other words, the reversed order of the agent and patient just makes the latter more prominent as somewhat “new” information while the former provides the given information and setting as the ground.IV. ConclusionThe perception of figure-ground is the direct result of human experience and the ground is the cognitive reference of the figure. Figure is perceived as “standing out” from the remainder (the ground) in the scene, and the ground as “a reference entity, one that has a stationary setting relative to a reference frame” 6. And it gradually becomes the new and effective way to interpret the traditional linguistic phenomena. Currently, some scholars have applied it into the explication of some salient language structures, for example, the analysis of parallel construction demonstrates that the main clause is taken as figure and the subordinate is regarded as the ground. As for adverbial sentences, they comply with the order from the figure to the ground. And in attributive clauses, the clause aiming to clarify the previous information is regarded as the ground part, and the antecedent providing central information is taken