English Light Verb Constructions:from The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

As a special kind of verb, light verbs universally exist in many languages. Linguists have made a systematic and in-depth study of light verbs which is based on the Minimalist Program Theory of TG Grammar. Initially, light verbs have been considered as having no lexical meaning in many researches, and they are taken as purely functional in syntactical studies to present the person and tense. But with the development of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics. Construction Grammar has come up with an alternative perspective of light verbs and light verb constructions (hereafter "LVCs").This thesis attempts to study the light verb constructions based on the existing classification method of it, and use the COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English) as the source corpus, then focuses on the typical LVCs which tries to explain that as a special kind of construction. LVCs also have their constructional meaning, and the constructional meaning is not equal to the sum of each part in the construction. Otherwise, the light verbs in light LVCs should have their special meanings as well.Traditionally, light verb constructions have been considered as a construction which centered on the nouns, and the constructional meaning is mainly reflected by the meaning of the head noun. When people study LVCs they often regarded it as a verb phrase which combines a light verb and a deverbal noun.From the perspective of Construction Grammar, the present paper found that there exists a kind of coercion in LVCs which as a result of the interaction between constructional and lexical meaning, that is, the head noun (deverbal noun) in a LVC will be coerced by the construction, and the lexical meaning of it would be weakened while pass onto the light verb in the construction.Meanwhile, the purpose of this paper is to explore LVCs from the perspective of coercion theory of Construction Grammar, and tries to expose the invisible coercion, and the mechanism of LVCs which could be of some help to the upcoming research and teaching of English LVCs.