An Analysis Of English Compound Words Based On Construction Grammar Theory

This thesis makes a clear analysis of form and meaning of English Compound Words, in order that we can understand how these compounds are formed and how their complex meaning is constructed, based on Construction Grammar.Construction Grammar is a theory based on cognitive linguistics, developing in the late 1980s. This chapter gives a general description of Construction Grammar Theory, mainly about the birth and development of the theory, and about its advantages and disadvantages. Construction Grammar insists that construction is the basic unit of the language. As a new linguistic theory, Construction Grammar mainly refers to four branches with the development of linguistic fields. At home and abroad, a lot of linguists and scholars have put their interests on the field of Construction Grammar. In Construction Grammar, the most important notion is the construction, which is the combination of form and meaning. As for the form of constructions, it is not the simple sum of the components, but greater than the sum. And to analyze the meaning of the construction, it not only needs to notice the syntactic meaning existing between the separate parts, but also the pragmatic meaning of the construction.As we all know, compounding, as one of the most ancient approaches of word formation, represents one remarkable feature of English Vocabulary. More importantly, as the rapid development and change of society, the updating of new words in all fields has been its indicators, especially the compounding words. Therefore, for the contemporary linguistic research, the complex compounds have been the focus. The linguists from home and abroad put great efforts to research English compound words from a wide variety of aspects. This chapter gives a general introduction of the researching objects, that is, English compounds, mainly from the definition, classification, construction and meaning.There are three parts in the thesis:an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its main contents are as follows:The first part is the introduction, describes the abroad studies of English compounds from the angle of Structuralism, Formalism, Semantics and Cognition, and the studies of compound words from linguists at home. Furthermore, it explains compound words based on Construction Grammar.The second part is the main body, which is made up of three chapters:Chapter One not only presents the overview of Construction Grammar Theory, especially the description of the most important notion, that is, construction, but also introduces English Compound Words being the researching object from two aspects: definition and classification.Chapter Two clearly explores compounds’form containing internal and external constructions. And the internal construction of English compounds is formed by two single parts, which can be variety of categories, in addition, that process also involves the suffixation (-ed,-er,-ing and the like), which makes it more complex. However, it still has some rules to follow. With regard to the external construction of the English compound words, the whole meaning of which may focus on its one part, being the head, or may not be determined by the complete structure, but a particular or fixed sense. In other words, the external construction contains the endocentric construction and the exocentric construction.Chapter Three describes the meaning of compounds from syntactic and pragmatic aspects separately; in general, compounds’syntactic meaning can be divided into ten categories. And as for the meaning of the compounds, whether it is literal or needs more elaborate mental structures is decided by the context, that is, the pragmatic meaning. In this chapter, the pragmatic meaning contains the metaphoric meaning, the foundation of which is the similarity of the constituents in terms of meaning and the metonymic meaning, the basis of which is the relevance between components of the compound word.The last part is the conclusion:it is the summary of this study’s great help and profound significance to the learning and understanding of English complicated vocabulary.In this thesis, the study of English compound words based on Construction Grammar proves the plausibility of using this approach for analyzing English vocabulary, especially the special ones. In addition, this study has great guiding significance in learning of English vocabulary and also reading comprehension and translation; meantime it can provide experience for the study of other special constructions such as homonym construction, antonym construction in Chinese and so on.