A Study Of Caused-motion Construction In English Based On Spoken Corpus Of The BNC

With the flourish of the Cognitive Linguistics in the study of languages,the Construction Grammar as a new perspective for grammar research draws increasing number of scholars’ attention.The caused-motion construction is one of the most important research content of the Construction Grammar and reflects human being’s basic life experience.Its basic semantic meaning is that the causer argument causes the theme argument directly to move along a path with the structure of “X causes Y to move Z”.Although the relevant studies of the caused-motion construction are progressing in depth and scope at home,there are still some drawbacks.For example,firstly,most of the domestic researchers tend to study the construction with the example sentences listed by previous studies rather than applying the authentic data.Secondly,the study of the spoken language of the construction is few.Therefore,the present thesis attempts to exploit the spoken corpus of the BNC as the source of authentic research data to study the caused-motion construction in spoken English.Based on Goldberg’s Construction Grammar,the research takes top-down and bottom-up approaches and employs corpus to conduct a research of the caused-motion construction in spoken English.Theprocess of the research involves the decoding of the data,encoding of the data again,retrieving the corpus by regular expressions,and artificial screening through semantic restrains,etc.In addition,relevant research has not been found at home on the Construction Grammar exploiting regular expressions of the caused-motion construction.Therefore,application of the regular expression of the construction is one of the most difficult and innovative points of the thesis.The thesis aims to answer the following three questions.1.What are caused-motion verbs and caused-motion construction expressions in English spoken corpus of the BNC? 2.What are relations between these caused-motion verbs and caused-motion construction expressions in English spoken corpus of the BNC? 3.What are relations among these caused-motion construction expressions in English spoken corpus of the BNC?Through answering the above questions,the research obtains the following findings.1.There are 3946 caused-motion construction expressions in spoken corpus of the BNC,which include 194 kinds of caused-motion verbs.2.From the fusion between profiled participant roles of the verb and profiled argument roles of the construction,a conclusion is drawn that there are two main relations between caused-motion verbs and construction expressions,which are profiling mismatches and the mismatches of the number of roles.In addition,mismatches in the number of roles takes a larger part in these two fusion situations.3.The caused-motion construction expressions are relevant to polysemy.Firstly,3806 expressions are associated with the basic meaning of the caused-motion construction,“X causes Y to move Z’.Secondly,140 sentences are related to the derived meaning of the caused-motion construction.Furthermore,these 140 sentences can be divided into four groups: 72 sentences have the meaning of “X causes Y to move Z” if the conditions denoted by predicates are satisfied;10 expressions entail the meaning of “X causes Y to move Z” by removing barricade in the construction;13 sentences,as oppose to the above 10 expressions,express “X causes Y to move Z” by imposing barricade in the construction;finally,45 expressions contain the meaning of “X helps Y to move Z”.The research has made a deep and comprehensive interpretation of the caused-motion construction in spoken English.Especially,the compiling of the regular expression of the caused-motion construction is the new attempt to combine the construction with corpora more closely.It will be able to provide a new approach to the research of the caused-motion construction and Construction Grammar.Additionally,the analysis and summary of the basic meaning and semantic constraints of the construction in the thesis may expect to lay the foundation for further researches of the construction.