A Study On The English X-ER Construction From The Perspective Of Usage-based Construction Grammar

Among all the word-formation methods,affixation(derivation)is one of the most powerful word-formation methods.English nominalization suffix-er(e.g.teacher,singer)has been very productive since ancient English,and it is also one of the most productive affixes in modern English.As this property is relatively obvious,previous studies have mainly sorted-er suffix nouns in the purely lexical scope to investigate their semantic features.With the development of cognitive linguistics,Goldberg(2003) proposes that the scope of construction should include morphemes,words,phrases,and clauses between words and phrases.In response to the queries from different scholars about morpheme construction,Goldberg(2009b) adjusts the scope of construction to regard structurally fixed words as “partial fixed word construction”(e.g.V-er,N-er).Subsequently,Booij(2010) establishes Morphology Construction to analyze the internal structure of words based on construction.He proposes that in Morphology Construction,the meaning of derivative affixes can only be understood through morphological construction,and affixes are part of Morphology Construction(Booij,2012).Thereafter,the suffix-er is included in the scope of the construction,examining its construction meaning,construction type,and formation mechanism.Although the constructivity of English suffix-er has gradually been recognized by the academic circles,there are still many deficiencies in the current study of X-ER Constructions from the perspective of construction,such as previous studies mainly belong to qualitative research,which focuses on theoretical analysis but lack of scientific experimental data support and so on.For example,the study of X-ER Construction focuses on V-er Construction,while ignoring the influence of other parts of speech.In addition,most of the studies on X-ER construction are qualitative,lacking scientific experimental data as a support.Therefore,it is necessary to study the internal structure of the X-ER Construction and its formation from the empirical data.We believe that the formation of X-ER Construction not only relates to the constructional schema,but also is influenced by metaphor and metonymy mechanism.To verify this hypothesis,we interpret it by means of the constructional schema.The X-ER constructional schema can be abstracted as “the performer of the action X”(?)[[X]x er]N.The constructional schema is composed of two parts,one of which is a fixed-er suffix and the other part is an open slot X.Different word-of-speech words enter the slot to form a new-er nominals.X-er derivative system is a prototype category,which core meaning can be summarized as “human agent who performs a constant action or engages in a professional activity”(Heyvaert,2003,P.106).That is to say,to some extent,X-er nouns embodying human characteristics are metaphorically relates to this core meaning by means of personification.However,not all X-er nominals bases on Metaphorical mapping.For example,the X-er tool nominals can be regarded as a metonymic form based on the human agent prototype or the product of the agentive extension and evolution of the X-er derivative system prototype(Zhang Gaoyuan,2008).Therefore,we believe that the metaphorical and metonymic mechanisms work together to form the cognitive basis of the X-ER Construction.Accordingly,from the perspective of Usage-based Construction Grammar,this thesis attempts to answer the following research questions:1.How many kinds of word bases are there in the slot of X-ER Construction?2.What is the collostructional strength between each word base and the X-ER Construction?3.How do different kinds of word bases contribute to the formation of X-ER Construction?In order to answer these questions,we have established a proposed theoretical framework,which combines Construction Grammar,Usage-based Theory,Constructional Morphology,and Cognitive Grammar.With COCA(Contemporary American English Corpus)as the corpus source,this thesis extracts the required target constructions and sums up the distribution of word bases.Whereafter,constructional analysis is adopted to analyze the collostructional strength of word bases with R software.At the same time,the formation mechanism of X-ER Construction is interpreted through the mechanism of metaphor and metonymy combine with case study.It shows that:(1)According to our statistical results on the part of speech of X,verbs account for the largest proportion,and nouns and adjectives rank second and third respectively.Next are adverbs,prepositions,numbers,and even idioms.Among them,verbs accounting for 78.91%;nouns accounting for 17.53%;adjectives accounting for 2.68%;adverbs accounting for 0.33%;prepositions accounting for 0.16%;numerals accounting for 0.33%;idiom accounting for 0.06%.In addition,there is a special compound lexicon that needs to be emphasized,namely the OV-ER word base,which accounts for 5.23%.(2)In line with the raw frequency data and the final calculation results of R software,the collocation strength of verb base is the strongest,while that of preposition base is the weakest.Therefore,the overall rankings of collostructional strength of X-ER Construction are as follows:Verb word base > noun word base > compound word base > adjective word base > adverb word base > numeral word base > prep word base > idiom word base.(3)Whether the word bases,X,are verbs,nouns,adjectives or other part-of-speech,the construction of X-er nominals always shows the same schema.In other words,X-er nominals are a complex category of concepts.In the prototype category,other meanings relates to prototype through metaphor and metonymy.Specifically,when X-ER Constructions are represented as animals,plants and some inanimate references,they are mainly formed through conceptual metaphor expansion.When the X-ER Constructions are characterized by professional and instrumental references,the-er nominals mainly formed by conceptual metonymy expansion.Furthermore,there are some complex vocabularies(e.g.dancer),which requires the interaction of metaphor and metonymy to promote the formation of the-ER Construction.In addition to the reference of object,when X-ER Constructional reference is expressed as event,it often claims the interaction of metaphor and metonymy mechanism.The research on X-ER Construction shows that it has strong generality in practical application.Specifically,according to the results of the study,the constructional meaning of X-ER Construction can be simply summed up as O-V-er,namely,the transmitter of energy.In addition,this discovery is helpful for English learners to understand and master English word formation.At the same time,this study combines Construction Grammar with Construction Morphology,which provides a new perspective for the follow-up study of word formation.