A Comparative Study Of The Verb-Copying Construction And The Other Types Of The Chinese Verb-Resultative Construction From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

Verb-copying Construction (VCC) refers to a construction in which one verboccurs twice in the same sentence. From the perspective of Goldberg’s ConstructionGrammar (CxG), this paper discusses the constructional form of VCC, namely,S+V1+O+V2+C and its meaning with which the form is paired. The constructionmeaning of VCC is that the instigator explicitly sustains or repeats the action event andthe affected one undergoes a change of state. The central sense of VCC still lies in thetelicity of the action event. And according to the semantics of the different varieties ofcomplements in VCC which is consistent with this telicity meaning of VCC, this paperholds that VCC has multiple derivative senses.Through the comparison of VCC and the other types of the ChineseVerb-Resultative Construction (VRC), this paper reveals the similarities between thesetwo constructions. Firstly, animate instigator or inanimate instigator are acceptable inboth constructions; secondly, stative verbs are unable to occur as predicate in bothconstructions, except for the psychological verbs; thirdly, both constructions exhibitsimilar patterns of semantic orientation by the complement; fourthly, both share thesame constructional aspectual constraint. VCC diverges from VRC. According to thispaper, the divergences include: firstly, VRC may have its semantic ambiguity whileVCC is by no means ambiguous; secondly, both transitive verbs and intransitive verbsare allowed to be fused into VRC while in VCC, intransitive verbs which are allowed tobe fused in VCC are subject to certain constraints; thirdly, in VCC, two predicate verbsin one and the same form denote the same action event while there is only one predicateverb in VRC; fourthly, sustainment or repetition of the action event is expressedexplicitly in VCC, coinciding with the constructional form and meaning, but such sustainment or enduring happening can only be implied in VRC.All in all, VCC can be regarded as one subtype of VRC, sharing some propertieswith VRC, but differing from it in some other regards.