A Study Of Chinese Resultative Construction From The Perspective Of Cognitive Construction Grammar

Chinese Resultative Construction(CRC)is one of the most popular research topics in Chinese grammar.The research on CRC can be divided into three kinds based on different theoretical perspectives: the syntactic account,the lexical account and the cognitive account.Despite the distinctions among the theoretical perspectives,various accounts for CRC present similar research trends: the semantics becomes increasingly important,and the role of the integral structure is emphasized.These research trends coincide with the theoretical tenets of Cognitive Construction Grammar(Cx G).As the representative of constructional paradigm,Cx G has developed a complete theoretical system and research frame,which provides reliable research guidance for CRC description.However,Cx G needs to be expanded to provide suitable descriptive tools for CRC description.With the status quo above,this research takes Cx G as guiding theory,and expands the current instantiation model of Cx G to establish the theoretical framework.Instances of V-Lei and V-Shi are selected out of BCC as the research material.After the instances are marked according to the theoretical framework,this research analyzes and describes CRC in terms of its construction features,instantiation mechanisms,and motivations.This dissertation is intended to answer three research questions.First,what are the construction features of CRC?Second,what are the instantiation mechanisms of CRC?Third,what are the motivations for CRC features?The corpus is analyzed and marked based on the Extended Instantiation Model.Then,the statistical pattern of CRC is summarized from the corpus to present a usagebased CRC description.Qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted based on the nature and requirement of the research questions.The research findings include the following points.First,CRC consists of two parts: the compulsory verbal components(V1 as the Cause Verb,and V2 as the Result Verb),and the optional noun components(NP1 as the Causer,and NP2 as the Resultee).This construction property gives rise to the complexity in CRC,as well as the construction's category structure.Therefore,CRC,as a grammar category,consists of multiple members,each of which can be defined as sub-constructions based on its formal and semantic features.Meanwhile,CRC allows the elaboration structures,which function to provide necessary background information that is otherwise acquired from the context.The elaboration structure is not CRC-specific,but a prevailing phenomenon in Chinese grammar.The elaboration structure is an independent grammatical structure.However,due to its semantic link to CRC,its components are easily misinterpreted as part of CRC.The description of CRC helps to reveal the nature of CRC ambiguity.In essence,there is no ambiguity when it comes to the concrete CRC instances—no instance in the corpus is found to be semantically ambiguous.The multiple interpretations of particular CRC instances are never found to be common to all instances.To certain extent,these interpretations are possible,but they are not solely the result of CRC properties.These traditionally regarded “polysemous” instances are the result of CRC,elaboration structure and reversed mechanism.In this sense,the semantic ambiguity is about these special instances,but not an essential property of CRC.Second,the description of CRC instantiation cannot directly borrow the framework of ERC,because the former process requires two verbs(verb of cause and verb of result)simultaneously,while the later allows only one.It is found that CRC is fused with the instantiating verbs in different manners.The fusion between CRC and the verb of result is in accordance with the current description of Cx G.The fusion between CRC and the verb of cause is based on formal metonymy and coercion mechanism.Formal metonymy is not unique for CRC.The mechanism is seen widely in the use of both Chinese and English.However,the function ranges of the mechanism are different in the two languages.In Chinese,formal metonymy allows CRC to be fused with two verbs simultaneously,and hence is the key to the description of CRC instantiation.Third,all the features about CRC are motivated.The motivations of CRC come from experiential,construal and grammatical levels.Experientially,CRC is motivated by cause-result link in the world.With the influence of construal motivation,CRC consists of four components.The result-centered angle gives more weight to the result event,which,in turn,is reflected in the instantiation process.The grammatical motivation equips CRC with necessary tools to represent the target construal.The comparison of ERC helps to reveal what motivation is peculiar for CRC.While the experiential motivation for CRC is also shared by ERC,the construal and grammatical motivation for CRC are more or less unique.On the one hand,CRC components and the grammatical category of their representations are not motivated by Chinese-specific factors.On the other hand,the result-centered perspective and certain grammar resources that are not found in English do motivate CRC to have some features that are missing from ERC.One more interesting phenomenon about CRC motivation is that different kinds of motivations work together.They collaborate as a network to explain the features of CRC.The experiential motivation is foundational to construal motivation,while the former is manipulated by the latter.The construals are only representable when there are proper grammatical resources.Hence,the motivation network of construction includes factors at least from three aspects: experience,construal,and grammar.In each aspect,both universals and variants exist.The interactions among the motivations from these three aspects in different languages lead to various construction systems.The motivation network,then,reveals the underlying reasons for the described properties of CRC.In summary,CRC description not only expands the application range of Cx G,but also enriches the theoretical system.This research,based on Cx G,describes CRC with certain objectivity,and provides a novel perspective as well as interesting conclusions upon the classic questions related to the construction.In this sense,this research promotes the development of CRC research.In the meantime,this research,through an in-depth analysis of CRC,explores the establishment of the constructional theories and principles that are suitable for Chinese.At last,the ERC-CRC comparison enriches construction motivations and reveals the motivation interactions.The comparison also provides suggestions for the translation and teaching of these two constructions.Besides,the method designed for this research also represents the effort of methodology exploration.