On Interaction Between Sentence Construction And Lexical Items

Chinese NP1-Vi-le (Perf)-NP2construction, as a special and tricky sentence groupbest exemplified by “Wangmian sile fuqin”(Wangmian’s father died), has caughtattention of linguistic scholars from different schools as early as in the1950s. What isparticularly striking is the achievement made by the researchers from CognitiveLinguistics.Since1990s, a large number scholars represented by Shen Jiaxuan have tried toemploy cognitive methods to probe into the construction. They have widened theresearch scope and proposed many convincing solutions like Shen’s “mind gain-loss”hypothesis. A novel branch of CL is Construction Grammar (CG) represented byGoldberg, which bolsters strong power in explaining non-core language phenomenon.Though some of the CL scholars have indicated that this group of sentences can beviewed as a construction, few of them have made a through research employing CG.The present thesis profoundly and theoretically applies Goldberg’s CG into theanalyzing of this construction, which we name Getting-losing Construction (GLC).The main research questions of the thesis are the motivations and central meaning ofGLC and the interaction mechanism between each lexical item and GLC as a whole.The main innovations of this thesis are:1. The motivation of GLC is inheritance from both Existential Construction (EC)and Transitive Construction (TC);2. The examples containing unergative verbs thatsome researchers propose are classified into Double Quantity Construction (DQC), inwhich NP2NP1. While in GLC, NP2is one element of NP1(i.e. NP2NP1) andonly unaccusative verbs are licensed;3. NP1is an independent noun, while NP2isattached to NP1, or the two are mutually dependent;4. GLC provides an addedargument for the intransitive verbs---θdependent. Besides, we put forward a newquestion---single syllable vs. double syllables verbs and give our explanations. In theend, a comparative study is made on the differences between Chinese, Japanese andEnglish on GLC.