A Collostructional Analysis Of The Resultative Construction In Modern English

The resultative construction in English is an intriguing area of academic interest.Its syntactic structure is “S+V+(O)+RP”,which consists of an agent(the subject),a causing event(the verb),and a resulting state(the resultative phrase).Early studies of the resultative construction mainly focus on the traditional syntactic and semantic perspectives.Construction grammar,which has developed since the late 1980 s,provides a new perspective.With the development of quantitative corpus-based methods,empirical approaches become more and more important in linguistic research.It is based on the authentic data,and uses statistical methods to quantify the data,which makes the result more accurate.However,studies of the quantitative corpus-based approach to the resultative construction are rare.This thesis is a quantitative corpus-based collostructional analysis of the resultative construction in modern English.It takes construction grammar and the usage-based model as the theoretical framework,and chooses BNC Sampler as data source and R software as research tool.This thesis attempts to deal with the following three research questions:(1)What are the raw frequency and collostruction strength of the covarying collexemes?(2)What are the semantic types of verb collexemes and adjective collexemes respectively?(3)What are the mechanism and relations between verb collexemes and adjective collexemes?As a type of collostructional analysis,the covarying collexeme analysis is conducted to calculate the collostruction strength between the verb slot and the adjective slot.The findings include the following:First,there are 678 occurrence of covarying collexemes in the BNC Sampler,and the most frequent one is make-sure.The collostruction strength shows that set-free is the most attractive one.Second,there are 39 verb collexemes and 194 adjective collexemes in the resultative construction.The verb colllexemes can be classified into verbs of motion,verbs of rest,verbs of affecting,and verbs of causation.The adjective collexemes can be divided into adjectives of color,adjectives of dimension,adjectives of human property,adjectives of physical property,adjectives of value,adjectives of difficulty and adjectives of qualification.Third,the verb collexemes and the adjective collexemes have conceptual relations.The verb collexemes have dynamic property,which denote the causing of an event.The adjective collexemes express the final state of the causing event.These relations further reveal the internal mechanism of language.