An MCI~+ Study Of English Present Perfect Progressive Construction

Aspect is ubiquitous in languages, by which people view an event or state in the use of language. Aspect in English can be divided into four types: simple, perfect, progressive and perfect progressive, in which present perfect progressive construction (PC) is made up of"has/have + been + V-ing". The primary sense of PC designates an action or state, which began in Afterward Span, reaches a current completion in the Cognitive Reference Span, and will continue to the Forward Span with emphasis on the ongoing nature.As an indispensable and so widely used element in English, aspect has been studied by quite a number of scholars, home and abroad, from the perspectives of structuralism, semantics, pragmatics, etc. in terms of perfect and progressive respectively. There are also researches on the cognitive mechanism of it from the viewpoint of Cognitive Linguistics. But so far seldom have we found the systematic researches on English PC, let alone researches based on Cognitive Grammar or Construction Grammar with sufficient statistical evidence. In order to bridge the gap, this thesis proposes integrated MCI~+ in an attempt to work out the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the construction by analyzing the data collected from British National Corpus of total 763 verb types and 3,699 tokens in the index formula of"has (*) been (*) V-ing".The thesis will be organized into the following five parts.Chapter One: Introduction. It focuses on a general introduction to this study, consisting of the motivation and significance of the research, research scope and objective, methodology and data collection, and also the layout of this thesis.Chapter Two: Literature Review. This part mainly presents the previous studies of English PC with especial aim to find out the gaps.Chapter Three: Theoretical Framework. In the hope of bridging the gap of the previous studies, this chapter proposes the integrated Multiple Interactive Coercion-Inheritance model (MCI~+) out of Construction Coercion, Lexical Coercion, Construction Inheritance and Integration as the theoretical framework. And MCI~+ will also be applied to the analysis of PC.Chapter Four: Data Description, Analysis and Discussion. In this part, a detailed description is firstly made based on the corpus. Secondly, an in-depth analysis of the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic features of English PC will be systematically held so as to work out the cognitive mechanism underlying it.Chapter Five: Conclusion. This chapter deals with the conclusion and three major contributions made by this study:First, the study establishes its theoretical framework by refining Goldberg (1995)'s static and off-line inheritance view into MCI~+ as to enforce the production of the theory.Second, this thesis, for the first time, systematically explores the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of English PC based on MCI~+ .Third, an entirely investigation is made on the distribution of verbs and adverbials co-occurring in English PC and their interactive relations.This chapter also points out limitations of the thesis and proposes suggestions for the further research.