A Corpus-based Cognitive Semantic Study Of English “V + Back” Construction

The “verb + particle” construction has always been an important topic of linguistic research.However,the existing cognitive semantic studies on “V + back” constructions are relatively few and how the “verb +particle” construction encodes the five macro-events has been scarcely studied presently.Therefore,this study is intended to investigate the “V + back” construction from the cognitive semantic view.By conducting a cognitive semantics study on the “V + back” construction,a better perception of not only this construction but also the macro perception of construction meanings can be achieved.The study is based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English with 94 verbs selected as research subjects from the top 100 high-frequency verbs that match with the “V + back” construction.It takes construction grammar and Talmy’s macro-event theory as the theoretical framework and adopts the method of collostructional analysis.The study investigates the semantic features and the functional extension of the“V + back” construction from three aspects,namely,the verb categories in the “V + back” constructions,the meaning categories of the particle back and the macro-events encoded by the construction.The results of the study show that: Firstly,72 verbs are significantly attracted to the “V + back”construction through collostructional analysis,which can be divided into 6 categories,namely,verbs of spatial movement,state-change verbs,verbs of change of possession,verbs of contact by impact,verbs of perception and miscellaneous verbs.Among them,verbs of spatial movement occupy the largest proportion.Secondly,the meanings of particle back in the “V + back” construction can be divided into 7 categories,which are “backward motion or in a low position on horizontal axis”,“leave from the observer on horizontal axis”,“disappearance”,“decrease and consumption”,“reduction”,“incompletion” and “apart”.While“backward motion” in the spatial domain is the prototypical meaning,the other meanings in non-spatial domains are derived from this meaning through metaphorical extension.Thirdly,the “V + back” construction can encode all the five macro-events proposed by Talmy,of which the action correlating event is less frequent in the data.In the motion event,both the particle back and the verb retain their core meanings.In the statechange event,back has a variety of meanings with varying degrees of grammaticalization while most of the verbs retain their literal meaning,with some working together with the particle to convey an opaque meaning.In the temporal contouring event and the realization event,back is used as an aspectual marker,while the verbs may or may not retain their original meanings.In the action correlating event,back denotes the aspectual meaning and the verbs retain their original meanings.Based on the findings,suggestions for construction grammar teaching and learning as well as phrasal verbs dictionary compilation are proposed.However,this thesis is only a tentative study of the components of the “V + back” construction.Therefore,there are inevitably some limitations that need to be further addressed and explored.