A Contrastive Collostructional Analysis Of GET TO V Construction And GET V-ing Construction

Non-finite verbs are key and difficult points in English teaching,especially the different usage of participles and infinitives.In the 1980 s,researches focus on contrastive study of grammatical usage and structural meaning from the perspective of traditional grammar.Since then,researches focus their non-finite verb study on grammar,syntax,semantics,pragmatics and other aspects.The development of constructional grammar and the rise of corpus linguistics provide a new perspective for the study of non-predicate verbs.This research regards construction grammar as theoretical foundation,selects get as example from BNC,and makes a contrastive collostructional study of GET TO V and GET V-ing constructions in relation to their internal verb morphemes from the perspective of constructional grammar,following the analytic procedure of “verbclass-specific”.This thesis attempts to address the following questions based on empirical analysis:(1)What are the features of verbs used in GET TO V and GET V-ing constructions? What are the semantic clusters and core meanings of two constructions respectively?(2)What inheritance relationship exists amongst the core meanings and extended meanings of the constructions?(3)What are the semantic characteristics of GET TO V and GET V-ing constructions respectively?In the collexeme analysis,which is one type of collostructional analysis,the P values and the collostruction strengths between collexemes and the constructions were accurately calculated.The research results show that:First,there are 69 and 20 verb collexemes reach the significant level in GET TOV and GET V-ing respectively.The verbs know and going can be regarded as core meanings due to their highest collostruction strength in the two constructions.The verbs selected from the corpus are dynamic verbs.According to their meanings,verb lexemes in GET TO V can be divided into “be able to obtain”,“acquisition of a property”,“acquisition of a continuous state” and “change of state” classifications.As to GET V-ing construction,it is divided into the categories of “keeping motion state”and “change of state”.Second,according to Goldberg’s construction grammar,polysemy,metaphorical extension and subpart links are established between constructions’ core meaning and extended meaning.Third,GET TO V and GET V-ing inherit the meaning of get to a certain extent on account of the significance of form-meaning pairs,and their core meanings belong to dynamic attributes.However,there are still obvious differences in semantic features between them.GET TO V construction embodies the subjective intention or unrealized action,with subjectivity and dynamicity;GET V-ing construction means the action has been done or is in progress,and that the event has happened or is happening,with objectivity and stability.From the speaker’s point of view,it reflects the speaker’s subjective certainty or uncertainty attitude towards the target event.Combining corpus,statistics and speculative methods with quantitative means,the research results show that the collostructional analysis method is more convincing to reveal the language essence,and it provides a new perspective for language research.Collostructional analysis is beneficial to improve the scientificity and objectivity for theoretical research in cognitive linguistics.