A Cognitive Study On Modern Chinese Detachable Construction Based On Metonymy-based Disyllabic Coercion

As a specific Chinese grammatical phenomenon, the detachable word (离合词inChinese) is attracting the attention of more and more scholars. Here it is defined asthe disyllabic structure which can be used either together or separately and whosemeaning cannot be derived from its two parts directly. Although it has beenconsiderably studied from structural and functional perspectives, their highlights arejust put on the description of the basic features and functions of detachable wordsother than an explanation of its production mechanism. And there are some studieson detachable words from the constructional view. However, few systemic studies onthe detachable construction are conducted under the framework of ConstructionGrammar.In this paper, the model of Metonymy-based Disyllabic Coercion (MDC) istentatively put forward which integrates cognitive metonymy and disyllabic coercion.Meanwhile, the Usage Dictionary of Modern Chinese Detachable Words by YangQinghui in1995is established as the closed corpus for our qualitative andquantitative studies. Under the framework of MDC model, the semantic, syntacticand pragmatic features of the detachable construction will be thoroughly analyzed.As a result, a unified interpretation for the production mechanism of detachablewords is provided for the future studies.The following results are concluded from this study:(1) Metonymy has played an important role in the cognitive level of detachablewords. Meanwhile, the AXB construction is formed under the coercion of disyllabicconstruction in the verbalization of detachable words;(2) The meaning of the detachable construction AXB comes from the interactionof X and AB while the meaning of AB originates from the interaction of A and Brather than the simple sum of them;(3) Among the1738AXB constructions, the verb-object construction accountsfor96.2%while the verb-compliment construction3.8%. The X and AB in these two different constructions have different syntactic functions which can be referred to inChapter Four;(4) With the development of new words, there will appear more and moredetachable constructions no matter whether they can be preserved for a long time.In this study, not only is the concept of disyllabification subtly brought into theframework of Construction Grammar, some advice to the future study on thedetachable construction is also provided.