The Lexical Status Of V-ed Forms In Contemporary English

In traditional grammar, V-ed forms are considered as the inflectional forms of verbswithout any lexical status. They are used to indicate tense or passive voice variation. Due totheir perplexing grammatical functions，they have drawn much attention from linguisticscholars. However, most of the previous studies are only given static descriptions of V-edforms on the syntactic level. Most scholars ignored the dynamic change happened to V-edforms on the lexical level. As a matter of fact some V-ed forms don’t only serve asinflectional forms of verbs, they are also recognized by the dictionary as headwords andhave their own entries in the dictionary, which are labeled wth part of speech withaccording senses. The phenomenon of the entry of some V-ed forms in the dictionary goesagainst the main tenet of the Generative Linguistics, in which linguistic representations areregarded as somehow fixed entities.In this paper, we will adopt the Usage-based Theory and the related corpus,combined with an effective research method to explain this phenomenon. We will focuson the dynamic change of V-ed forms on the lexical level. Through this research, we findthat: some V-ed forms have gained the lexical status via entrenchment andconventionalization and been included in the dictionary; the word frequency has a greatinfluence on the numbers of senses of V-ed forms, i.e., those with higher frequency tendto have more senses than those with relative lower frequency; the process oflexicalization of V-ed forms presents a fluid and dynamic aspect of language change,which is the output of the interaction of human cognition and langue in use.Based on the empirical study of some V-ed forms, the main contributions of thisthesis can be concluded in two aspects: theoretically, this study aims to probe into theessence of language production through the status change occurring to some V-ed formsand to provide the empirical evidence to defend Usage-based Theory; practically, it tries toprovide a reasonable guidance for dictionary makers to deal with V-ed forms and otherperplexing linguistic items in a more desirable way, which may be very helpful in varioustypes of dictionary making.