| This dissertation applies the Construction Grammar (CG) framework to an extensive corpus-based study of contemporary Mandarin ba-constructions. The corpus is built with fourteen contemporary Mandarin novels. One thousand two hundred and eighty-seven ba-constructions are collected from the corpus by TIR, a Chinese text information retrieving software. These constructions are classified into twenty broad classes on the basis of the meaning and form of their predicates. The important CG components used in the analyses include (1) the definition of a construction, (2) inheritance linking and (3) verb-construction interaction.;The ba-construction independence is established partially through an experiment with the data sentences and partially through some arguments against movement theories. The experiment reveals the nature of the relationships between the ba-constructions and the non-ba SVO transitive constructions.;MODE-PROMINENT COMPLEX AFFECTEDNESS is identified as the characterization of ba-constructions. MODE refers to the way the predicate is presented; PROMINENCE the profiled status of the ba NP; COMPLEXITY the predicate structure, and AFFECTEDNESS the semantic relation between the predicate and the ba NP.;The relationships among the ba-constructions are established through analyzing the complement positions, the meaning of the verb and the meaning of the complement in all the classes. An inheritance hierarchy is established among the ba-constructions, which connects the ba-constructions in a network through different links.;The major advantages and contributions: (1) the controversies about the derivation of ba-constructions and the generation of the morpheme ba do not arise because of the independent status of the ba-constructions; (2) the grammaticality problem of data does not exist because the data is real; (3) the issue of intransitive verb occurring in the ba-constructions is explained elegantly by the CG verb-construction interaction theory; (4) the status of the causative, the instrumental, and the post-verbal object ba-constructions are all explained by the CG lexicon-construction interaction theory and motivation-inheritance theory, and (5) the relations among different classes of the ba-constructions are systematically accounted for by the CG inheritance theory. |
