| The way construction is a special English argument structure,which can be skeletally presented as SUBJ_i[V[POSS_i way]OBL].The way construction describes the event that the subject reference spatially moves along a path.Initial work on the construction was carried out by Jackendoff in 1990 and focused primarily on its semantics and syntax.The first systematic study reporting on the way construction was conducted in 1995 by Goldberg.For a long time,scholars have been focusing on the historical evolution and semantic constraints of the way construction.The way construction has also been receiving much attention due to its high production,but the mechanism behind the thriving productivity remains unclear,and studies on this issue suffer from a lack of statistical support.In the light of the above,the study is carried out with the guidance of cognitive linguistics and starts from the verb collexemes occurred in the way construction gathering from COHA.With the help of collostructional analysis,the study tries to seek the answers to three research questions:(1)Which collexemes in the verb slot are strongly attracted by the way construction?(2)What are the characteristics of the verbs permitted in the way construction in different periods?(3)How to explain the mechanism of the high productivity behind the way construction by the interaction between verb meanings and construction meanings?The results of the study are as follows:(1)Data collected between 1810 and 2000 show that make and find ranked first and second among the ten strongest collocated verb collexemes with the way construction,followed by work,force,fight,push,pick,feel,grope and thread,all of which are typical verbs of the means interpretation and the manner interpretation.(2)All verb collexemes can be classified into four categories according to their semantic meanings:spatial path-creating verbs,indirect path-creating verbs,incidental verbs,and metaphorical path-creating verbs.The results show that verb collexemes that are strongly attracted to the way construction differ in different periods.The prototype semantic of the way construction in its early period is instantiated by the practical path-creating verbs,which represents the means of path-creating or obstacle-clearing displacement.Indirect path-creating displacement verbs are the extension of those of the means interpretation,and the collostructional strength of this category with the target construction is ranked the second.After the 1840s,the category with metaphorical path-creating verbs gradually became significantly attracted to the construction and gained its position.The collexemes of incidental verbs were not significantly attracted by the way construction until the 1930s.(3)It can be found from the diachronic development of the way construction that the expansion of the way construction conforms to the Schematic Networks developing model.In the upper layer,path-creating displacement is still the prototypical meaning of the way construction.The metaphorical extension from space to time is the semantic premise of the productivity of the way construction.Verbs in the instantiated layer expand within limits set by the upper schemas,and the newcomers are metonymically coerced by the constructional meaning to be sanctioned and successfully fit in the verb slot.The current study gathers authentic data from the corpus and adopts both the quantitative and qualitative methods.It displays the historical development track of the way construction and the characteristics of the verbs in the construction,which confirms the validity of the Semantic Networks as the theoretical framework to explain the fertile productivity of the way construction.It also makes a little contribution to the existing studies on the way construction to some extent. |
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