A Cognitive Study On The Way Construction

The Way Construction, a relatively complicated concept, has received much attention from linguists in the recent literature. Syntactically, The Construction can be represented as [SUBJi [V [POSSi way] OBL]]. Semantically, the Construction implies that the subject referent moves along the path designated by the prepositional phrase. It displays the feature of form-meaning correspondences that exist independently of particular verbs which instantiate it. The meaning of the Way Construction is not derived from the meaning of the lexical items which instantiate it or from the meaning of any other established construction. Thus, the Way Construction is a distinct construction in the light of Construction Grammar.This thesis provides a relatively comprehensive account of the Way Construction from cognitive perspective within the theoretical framework of the Construction Grammar by using both top-down and bottom-up approaches. First of all, the thesis makes a unified cognitive description of the general properties and semantic constraints of the Way Construction. Then this thesis tries to re-examine how the meaning of the Way Construction results from by discussing the interaction between the Way Construction and its verbs. Lastly, the thesis attempts to examine the cognitive motivations to the formation and meaning construal of the Way Construction from cognitive perspective and come to the conclusion that the property inheritance from related constructions and metonymic coercion are the cognitive motivations of the Way Construction.The thesis found that different scholars take different views on the several semantic interpretations of the Way Construction and use different terminology to term them. Based on the previous studies, the thesis tries to interpret the semantic of the Way Construction, and consider the Construction should be divided into three semantic categories: means interpretation, manner interpretation and incidental activity interpretation.Jackendoff (1990) suggested that the Way Construction can be thought of as a kind of'constructional idiom,'a specialized syntactic form with an idiomatic meaning, marked by the noun way. In Goldberg's book (1995), it is argued that it is necessary to posit an extralexical construction in the grammar for way expressions, since the sentential semantics is not naturally attributed to any of the lexical items'inherent semantic. Both of their ideas exaggerate the function of construction, which violate the interactive view of cognitive semantics. This thesis tries to re-examine how the meaning of the Way Construction results from by discussing the interaction between the Way Construction and its verbs and come to the conclusion that the whole sentential meaning comes from the integration of lexical cognitive meaning and constructional meaning.Then the thesis applied Construction Grammar developed by Goldberg and the opinion of metonymic coercion of Panther& Thornberg to examine the cognitive motivations to the formation and meaning construal of the Way Construction. It is found that the combination of the two approaches will be more interpretative to the Way Construction and the motivations can be clearly revealed in the cognitive model.The motivation of the Way Construction is to cause the action verbs to represent the action means or manner by metonymy coercion mechanism. In the cases of the Way Construction, the construction imposed its meaning on the lexical meaning and select or profile the lexical meaning which matches itself. By means of the metonymy mechanism ACTION FOR ACTION MEANS OR MANNER, the action verbs are coerced to represent the means of action or action manner so as to enter the Way Construction. This is the construal basis of the constructional coercion metonymy operating in the Way Construction.This study on the Way Construction proved that the Way Construction is deeply cognitively motivated, which is compatible to the meaning it intends to express. The revealing of cognitive motivations of the Way Construction will testify the interpretative power of cognitive theories.