Selectional Restrictions And Metonymic Interpretation Of V-TIME-Away Construction

Constructional approach to grammar develops into a significant approach to linguistic analysis. Constructional grammar, under the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, provides a different viewpoint for grammar analysis. Different from traditional grammar, which holds a componential standpoint, constructional account proposes that constructions are form-meaning pairings and contain meanings that cannot be attributed to the lexicons that fill them. As a cognitive approach to grammar, construction grammar devotes in characterizing and delineating constructions, and exploring the cognitive mechanism behind linguistic facts as well.Researches of English constructions focus on the typical constructions, such as ditransitive construction, cause-motion construction, way construction and resultative construction. V-TIME-away construction, syntactically similar to resultative construction, arouses few attention in the academia. Syntactically, V-TIME-away construction resembles resultative construction, which can be abstracted as Subj+V+Obj(time)+away. Whereas, the subject construction owns its distinct and specific selectional restrictions and constructional meaning. Thus, V-TIME-away construction is related to resultative construction by instance link. As an independent construction in the mean time, V-TIME-away construction contains the meaning "someone wastes some time in doing something", which cannot be deduced from the component parts of the sentence.The current thesis, based on coercion and inheritance links of Goldberg’s construction grammar and conceptual metomymy, attempts to make a further exploration of the selectional restrictions of V-TIME-away construction, and analyze the generation of constructional meaning of V-TIME-away construction through conceptual metonymy. Major conclusions of this thesis are:Firstly, the thesis proposes that the actional aspect of the verbs that occur in V-TIME-away construction is coerced by the constructional meaning "wasting time in doing something". The metomymic interpretation of such coercion is that "action costs time" serves as the source domain and it is mapped to the target domain "waste time" via the EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymy. In addition, V-TIME-away construction is an instance link of resultative construction, which allows V-TIME-away construction to gain the same interpretation as that of a resultative construction. In the meantime, V-TIME-away construction is a specific and independent construction on its own, featured by special constructional meaning of its own. This special constructional meaning "wasting time" is generated from the general resultative constructional meaning via EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymic interpretation.Secondly, this thesis summarizes three types of metonymic interpretation of the verbs that occur in V-TIME-away construction. The types of metonymic interpretation are:ACTION FOR MEANS, ACTION FOR AGENT and ACTION FOR PROCESS.