A Collostructional Analysis On English Resultative Construction

Resultative construction,as a common English grammatical pattern,has always attracted researchers’ attention due to the diversity of its syntactic structure.However,most of previous studies adopted introspection or qualitative researches,and there were few quantitative studies.In addition,these quantitative studies focused more on its usage and the types of verbs appearing in English resultative construction,but ignored the interaction between these verbs and English resultative construction.Collostructional Analysis method depending on Construction Grammar provides a more effective method for construction research.This method quantifies the data supported by a large corpus to analyze the cognitive mechanism behind language phenomenon,which is more accurate to reveal the semantic distributions of the construction.Therefore,this method is of great value for studying English RC.This paper considers English RC with adjectives as resultative phrases as research object.At first,it is found that there exist 24 adjectives that can serve as resultative phrases.Also,this study classifies 24 adjectives into two types in terms of their semantic features.Among them,Type I is usually used to express physical or emotional conditions,especially referring to human or animate objects,while Type II usually entails a physical property of objects,particularly inanimate things.Then,this study chooses six representative adjectives as fixed resultative phrases from Type I(dead,awake,unconscious)and Type II(apart,open,shut)respectively in terms of the occurring frequency of resultative adjectives in BNC.Moreover,this paper attempts to explore the semantic distribution of these verbs that occur in the target resultative constructions so as to further probe into the typical meaning of the target construction and its semantic network.Based on this,the present paper mainly answers the following several questions:Firstly,what types of verbs are strongly associated with the English resultative constructions with Type I resultative adjectives(dead,awake and unconscious)and Type II resultative adjectives(apart,open and shut)? What are the differences and similarities between these verbs that fall into the two sub-construction?Secondly,how do these verbs interact with the target constructions? And what is the typical meaning of the target resultative construction?Thirdly,how is the semantic network of the target RC formed? And what’s the cognitive mechanism and motivation of the target resultative construction?According to the above questions,several findings are stated below:Firstly,this study has found that the three semantic types(contact verbs,motion verbs and change verbs)can fall into the two sub-construction,and contact verbs account for the highest proportion.However,communication verbs and emotion verbs merely occur in English RC with Type I resultative phrases(dead,awake,unconscious);perception verbs only appear in English RC with Type II resultative phrases(apart,open,shut).Secondly,these verbs interact with the target construction by means of elaborations,force-dynamic relations and preconditions so as to form constructional meanings.Among them,contact verbs,which take up more than half of all of verbs,are closest to the typical meaning of the target resultative construction.Besides,the result is consistent with the previous findings that claimed the semantic expression of resultative construction is defined as “ X causes Y to become Z”.Hence,the typical constructional meaning of the target construction can be described as “Agent X causes Patient Y to become Result Z by directly contacting Patient Y”.Lastly,the typical meaning and atypical meanings form a semantic network depending on sub-part links.In addition,this paper has found that the formation the target resultative constructions depends on three major causes,including the function of resultative phrases,the productivity of verbs(or the interaction between verbs and the target resultative construction)and the formation of semantic network based on inheritance links.This paper adopts Collostructional Analysis to analyze the collostructional strength between verbs and English RC,which has enhanced the scientific nature and effectiveness of this study to a certain extent.In addition,this study chooses Goldberg’s Construction Grammar to interpret the interaction between verbs and English RC as well as its semantics,which shows this theory has the great explanatory power,and it can also be applied to explore other similar constructions.