A Study On Chinese Causative Resultative Construction Within The Framework Of Construction Grammar

The resultative construction (RC), a special Chinese grammatical phenomenon, generally consists of two parts——a primary verbal predicate and a secondary resultative predicate, with the former denoting an action and the latter denoting the result triggered by the action. The construction fully manifests the characteristics of Chinese grammar being concise and having multiple meanings. Owing to its specialties and advantages, this construction has been attracting the attention of many linguists and researchers. Previous studies attempt to explore its syntactic and semantic features, such as its head and valence, leaving the process of the elevation of participants involved in the semantic framework of its constituents to arguments of the whole construction ignored to some degree. Thus, the author attempts to deal with this issue under the guidance of construction grammar.For the purpose of a comprehensive examination, the thesis, in terms of the semantic reference of the resultative complement and the source of subjects, categorizes this Chinese construction into seven sub-constructions, four of which are object-oriented RC and three of which are subject-oriented RC. Bound by the principle of iconicity, the Result has a marked tendency of back-orientation, which is the very reason that the overwhelming majority of the instantiations of SVRO fall within the scope of object-oriented RC. Although the general meaning of RC is "CAUSE-BECOME", each sub-construction denotes various specific meanings, exerts different constraints on the Verb and the Result within it and involves different mechanisms of argument realization.In Goldberg’s view, the interaction between verbs and constructions involves two mechanisms:fusion and sole contribution; and the integration of participants involved in verbs with arguments of constructions ought to observe the semantic coherence principle and the correspondence principle. However, it does not always seem to be the case when the arguments of this Chinese construction integrate with the participants of the Verb as its syntactic head. The integration between them may violate the semantic coherence principle under the influence of cognition. The special case does not lower the empirical value of construction grammar since it itself is, in essence, subordinate to cognitive linguistics. In order to differentiate the novel mechanism from the former two, the author terms it "condensation".Besides, the present study also makes a tentative study on the ambiguity of the same Chinese resultative sentence. Based on the research fruits on the interaction between the Verb and the RC configuration in the SVRO, the author analyzes the ambiguous Chinese sentence“张三追累了李四(Zhangsan zhui-lei-le Lisi)" and holds that the ambiguity of a sentence stems from the fact that it can simultaneously match a variety of sub-constructions. Meanwhile, an instantiation of a given sub-construction can be transformed into another sub-one many a time. That is to say, the same scene can be described by multiple sub-constructions, among which the sole difference is that various roles are given the prominence. The transformation amply justifies the existence of a hierarchy system among constructions.Through an in-depth exploration of this Chinese construction, the thesis provides a conclusive proof that construction grammar, a new western linguistic theory, can be applied to analyze Chinese constructions, particularly the special ones. In addition, RC is one of the difficult points in Chinese learning due to its specialties; thus, the fruits of the current study may offer help and reference for Chinese learners.