| This research is a Construction Grammar approach to the polysemy of the Chinese modal verb"neng".Both qualitative and quantitative analysis have been adopted to investigate 1,892"S neng VP"structures occurred in a 2,940,000-word-corpus from Modern Chinese Corpora of Chinese Language Research Centre of Beijing University.We aim at, from the point of view of language generation, via considering the"S neng VP"structure as a construction, searching for its construction semantics and syntactic features, thus to explicate the relation between meaning and its very form, searching for the motivation of its polysemy as well as a series of syntactic features, positioning the syntax generating mechanism in the grammatical system of Chinese language.First of all, this research proves that"S neng VP"structure is an independent construction, which means its own meaning is independent of that of each individual component of the structure. This is also to say that the meaning of the structure could not be inferred or deduced from that of its parts. According to the corpus, Verb Phrase of the structure"S neng VP"is characterized by the prevailing use of a resultative construction which features result of an action. At the same time the Verbal Phrase of the structure refers to the irrealis status, which means that the cause of the result could not attributed to the full verb itself but the construction instead. The corpus also shows that the"S neng VP"structure is characterized with causative subject. Therefore we find out the compatibility of the construction meaning and its syntax. And the construction meaning is"S has conditions to realize VP".Secondly, after the"S neng VP"structure has been proved to exist as a construction, we start to discuss what is the relation between the central construction meaning and its extended meaning. The cognitive frame serves as the generating mechanism while metaphor or metonymy is of help to the meaning extension.The central construction meaning is"S has conditions to realize VP". Under the influence of the"container-content"cognitive frame, if a causative element is subject itself, it could be considered as an inner causative element, which is"ability"of a subject. If a causative element is subject-concerned, it could be considered as an outer causative element, which is"situation"of a subject. These are the two sense of the central construction meaning"condition". And the meaning of"ability"is extended through metaphor. As for animated subject,"ability"extends from"innate ability"to"acquired ability","social ability"and finally to"mental ability". As for non-animated subject,"ability"actually means the function of an object."Ability"extends from the function of an object itself to the function of an object to others. Like the meaning of"ability","situation"extends its meaning also through metaphor, it extends from the meaning"influence of the situation on human being or objects"first in physical world, then social world finally the mental world. The construction grammar approach to"S neng VP"structure well explains the polysemy of the construction and tells where they originate and where they extend, the motivation of this phenomina as well as other syntactic features determined by this construction. Evidences in Children's language acquisition have also been shown.Last but not the least, this research investigates the central meaning and extended meaning of the"S neng VP"construction and generalizes its modal category which is very much in accordance with Van der Auwera and Plungian's modal category, showing that cognitive patterns of human beings could be reflected in language expressions. This research also discusses the modal use of"'S neng VP"construction and its subjectivity in the framework of Cognitive Grammar. It explains the differences between its dynamic use of the"S neng VP"construction and a full verb used to description of the world. It refutes that modal verb"neng"has both modal use and non-modal use.
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