An ICE Study Of "THERE-SNP" Construction

There Be No NP (in) V-ing Construction (THERE-SNP) is one particular subordinate member of the English Existential Construction (EC) family. In-depth researches in this regard have been done from perspectives of syntax and systemic functional grammar; some cognitive linguists have also attempted to elaborate on the cognitive features of EC with the theory of Iconicity, Grammaticalization, Figure-Ground and CRP-Action Chain respectively. However, no detailed constructional analysis has been done on this particular construction, let alone any statistical support. Researches on Shell Noun have been conducted solely by H.J. Schmid's monograph (2000), while no further development has been done both at home and abroad. In the frame of CCxG, the study proposes ICE (multiple inheritance & construction coercion plus e-site) to expound the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features respectively via Construction Procedure Network (CPN) from 16 aspects. We have exhaustively collected 1356 tokens from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC) to establish a closed corpus for the qualitative and quantitative research.The paper consists of the following five chapters.Chapter One focuses on a general introduction to the peper, including motivation, research scope, the general methodology, data collection, and layout.Chapter Two presents the literature review of related studies, including previous studies on EC and THERE-SNP, and Schmid's researches on Shell Noun. The gap found in previous studies is also included in this section.Chapter Three, in the hope of filling the gap, is dedicated to establishing ICE in the frame of CCxG. THERE-SNP, with the prototypical constructional meaning of subjective negation of an action, has inherited related syntactic features, semantic contents and pragmatic implicatures from EC, No NP and SN-V-ing respectively. When used in the construction stative verbs are coerced into displaying dynamicity; "No NP"entails e-site relying on the elaboration of V-ing to obtain immediate specified meaning.Chapter Four concerns data analysis and discussion. Based on data description and statistical distribution, the data distribution of"Be","SNP","in","V-ing"as well as their interactions have been expounded. The syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of THERE-SNP are analyzed via CPN in the second section.Chapter Five deals with conclusion and the three main findings of this study:First, the present study has for the first time attempted to establish ICE in the frame of CCxG and conducted the first systematic constructional study on THERE-SNP, from which the central constructional meaning is determined. With the assistance of CPN, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of THERE-SNP are thoroughly analyzed as well.Second, a closed corpus of 1356 tokens of THERE-SNP has been established from authoritative British and American corpora. ICE is thus verified with quantitative analysis.Third, the in-depth interpretation of THERE-SNP further develops Schmid's researches on Shell Noun. We have complemented 69 Shell Nouns in our data based on Schmid's corpus of 670 Shell Nouns which belong to six categories.The last section also points out limitations of this study and proposes suggestions for further research.