A Cognitive Semantic Study Of English V+UP Construction: Based On COCA

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of language and plays a key role in learninglanguage well. It is also a good way to help language learners enhance their linguisticcompetence. There are various kinds of productive phrasal verbs in English. Manyphrasal verbs have their own salient syntactic and semantic features, which make them abig headache to English learners and thus receive great attention from linguisticresearchers.Most phrasal verbs are composed of “a verb+a particle” or “a verb+an object+aparticle”. According to the data provided by previous researchers, UP is the mostfrequently used particle and V+UP is the most complicated construction. Therefore, it ismeaningful and of great value to conduct a related study on it. The present thesis isprimarily concerned with these three questions:(1) What image schemas are involved inthe meaning formation of the particle up?(2) What features do the verbs have in V+UPconstruction?(3) How are the meanings of V+UP construction constructed? In thethesis, the cognitive linguistic theories such as image schema theory, prototype theory,and conceptual metaphor are adopted to analyze how the meaning of V+UPconstruction is constructed. It is found that polysemy is mainly motivated by imageschema transformation. The semantic influence on V+UP construction from the verbsand the particle up are explained. This research is a corpus-based study on V+UPconstruction, making use of COCA as the research tool. Both quantitative andqualitative research methods are used. The data of the study are from a large, wellbalanced and naturally occurring American English corpus—COCA (the Corpus ofContemporary American English). After retrieving the first200frequently used phrasalverbs with up in COCA, the classification of them into five different image schemas isdone.Studies find that the senses of up mainly derive from these five image schemas:dynamic vertical up image schema, motion up image schema, goal image schema,container image schema and contact image schema. And there are more than ten sensesof the particle up. The prototypical meaning of up has to do with “in or towards a higherposition”. However, up has many metaphorical meaning extensions like accomplishingor finishing, connecting or gathering and fastening to form a barrier etc. The verbs inV+UP construction are predominately dynamic and monosyllable and most impressively they form the basic lexicon of English. What’s more, there exists semanticcounter-activation between the dynamic verbs and the particle up, so the verbs in V+UPconstruction are positive or neutral in prosody. Under the same image schema, thesemantically similar verbs can all collocate with up. Various senses of the particle up arerelated to each other and non-literal meanings are seen in terms of metaphoricalextensions. A large number of senses of V+UP construction share the features of FamilyResemblance.In learning and memorizing the semantic meanings of V+UP construction, specialattention should be paid to the metaphorical thinking underlying these linguisticexpressions. Under the guidance of these theories: that is image schema theory,prototypical theory, basic-level categories and conceptual metaphor, language learnerscan comprehend and master their meaning extensions relatively well. Many phrasalverbs used in V+UP construction are polysemous. Nevertheless, they are notunsystematic from the central meaning to the peripheral one. Recognizing theconceptual metaphor, leaners will surely be able to learn phrasal verbs faster and retainthem longer in memory. It is hoped that this thesis is helpful to language learners anddictionary compilers.