A Construction Analysis Of English Resultative Constructions

Most of the studies on English Resultatives are carried out from Syntactic, Event-Structure, Valency perspectives, among which we also have a few studies embarked from a perspective of Construction Grammar(Cx G). However, studies on English Resultative Constructions(RCs) from a perspective of Embodied Construction Grammar(ECG) are rarely documented. Through an integration of qualitative analysis, comparative analysis and a combination of top-down and bottom-up analysis, the thesis aims to investigate the formation motivation of English RCs and to deal with the formation mechanism of English RCs from a cognitive perspective. This thesis conducts an ECG analysis of English RC utterances in the following process, firstly the event scene and the specific A-S construction are judged as whole, and secondly constructions at lexical level and clausal level are analyzed, and thirdly all of these activated construction information, contextual information and cultural knowledge integrate into a mental simulation space, and eventually an inference about utterance semantics can be drawn.According to Prototype Theory of Cognitive Linguistics and prototypical characteristics of English RCs, the study classifies English RCs into five types, in which prototype English RC is Resultatives of Evoked Transitive CSA1 Construction and the other four types of periphery English RCs are Resultatives of Evoked Transitive CSA2 Construction, Resultatives of Evoked Intransitive CSA1 Construction, Resultatives of Evoked Intransitive CSA2 Construction and Resultatives of Intransitive SC3 Construction.Based on the studies of five types of prototype and periphery English RCs within the framework of Simulation-Based Language Understanding Model, the thesis argues that in people’s mental simulation activity, English Resultatives as a whole activate a highly abstract Cause State Action schema, whereas each type of specific English Resultative examples instantiates specific event-type construction. The understanding of the meaning of an English RC is a recognition of all the related constructions contained in this sentence. The analysis process shows that the semantic understandingof English RCs is based on the composition of schemas and constructions at different linguistic levels; and current context and world encyclopedic knowledge have great influence on the semantic understanding of English RCs.The study finds that all of the five types of English RCs instantiate a highly abstract Cause State Action schema and a clause-level Declarative construction. And only in the most outstanding representative of English RCs can the meaning of the verb constituent be specified with Cause State Action schema. In the periphery case, the meaning of verb constituent is represented as Force Application schema or Force Transfer schema; constructional composition acts as an intermediating role between the integration of schemas and constructions at different linguistic levels; this language understanding process pays more attention to the participation of contextual information, and only in the particular contextual background can the constructions of polysemy get right and reasonable explanation.Study results reveal that the existence of resultatives results from a sense of need to describe a cause-state event situation with requirements for language economy or simplicity and attentional view in cognition.