An Exploration Of Semantic Potentials Of English Phrasal Verbs:

English phrasal verbs, which are viewed as a special category of English idioms, can be said as an essential component of English vocabulary. Most phrasal verbs in English fall into the following three groups:(i) verb+adverb combination,(ii) verb+preposition combination, and (iii) verb+adverb+preposition combination. Each of them semantically behaves as a single verb in the syntactic structure. They are different from free combinations of verbs in respect of their fixed structure, complete meaning and free collocation with objects in usage. The English phrasal verb has long been a heated topic in linguistic inquiry. Based on the framework of Transformational Generative Grammar, traditional researches on phrasal verbs emphasize on their characteristics of construction, semantics, grammar and rhetoric. Semantic approaches to phrasal verbs discuss their semantic completeness from the perspective of interdependency mechanisms between the verb and its particle(s). They propose that the semantic potential of the verb itself determines the selection of its particle(s) and at the same time, the particle changes the meaning of the verb to some extent. Cognitive linguistics holds that the particle influences the meaning of the phrasal verb in English and tries to explore its cognitive evidence. In terms of cognitive models, the relatively fixed and highly idiomatic meaning of phrasal verb is conceptualized during the usage and development of language. Although these researches look much deeper into the semantic formation of phrasal verbs, none of them take the entire language system into consideration. The exact distinction between the form and meaning of English phrasal verbs has not been touched upon and the study on their semantic potentials and polysemy in the systemic semantic network is really rare.Systemic Functional Linguistics regards language as a systemic semantic network. It scrutinizes the ideational pattern that language serves to express semantic demands, construe social experience and connect social relationships from the perspective of sociolinguistics. Halliday explains that the meaning potential of language is realized by a system of three meta-functions, that is, ideational, interpersonal and textual function. Halliday and Matthiessen (2008) state that logogenesis is a process of making meanings in the development of text in the textual space. It is the process of meaning unfolding itself and also the instantial construction of meaning in the form of a text. They (2008) further propose that the system of a language is instantiated in the form of text under the influence of registers. Instantiation refers to the relationship between the semantic potential and language used in daily communication. Every culture has its own semantic potential and every discourse in a particular language owns a specific semantic potential (Martin&Wang,2008). Therefore, an instance of a particular language belongs to a specific grammatical or semantic category of the whole language system. The polysemy of the English phrasal verb which results from different collocations and contexts is the outcome of the instantiation of its semantic potentials. This thesis endeavors to explore the semantic potentials of English phrasal verbs within the framework of the Systemic Functional Linguistics.This paper, in the light of the stratification and instantiation of the Systemic Functional Linguistics, attempts to investigate the semantic potentials of English phrasal verbs and seek for answers to the following questions:(ⅰ) In the transitivity system of the ideational function, what kinds of experiences can be represented by English phrasal verbs?(ⅱ) In the interpersonal function, how the mood and modality are realized by English phrasal verbs?(ⅲ) In the textual function, how English phrasal verbs are used to reflect Theme-Rheme relation and mark the information structure?The results of this study reveal that, so far as ideational function is concerned, English phrasal verbs can represent six kinds of processes, which include twenty-nine sub-types of semantic potential. As to interpersonal function, every clause can denote modality. The clause, which takes the English phrasal verb as its center, could express the judgment on the possibility of event, or obligation and inclination of the participant. Besides, there are different degrees that can be selected from through the scales of modalization and modulation. In view of textual function, English phrasal verbs help to achieve text through lexical cohesion, reveal subject matter and convey the theme of the text.The study is of theoretical and practical significance. It not only investigates the semantic potentials of English phrasal verbs, but also shed light on the exploration of the descriptive framework of the systematic relationship among construction, components and semantics.