A COCA-based Study On The V+OUT Construction From Cognitive Perspective

It is well-known that vocabulary is an essential part of language learning, which plays an important part of language. So it is necessary to help language learners to improve their linguistic competence. The fact is that there are a great deal of productive phrasal verbs that contain their own salient syntactic and semantic characteristics, which is really a cause for headache to those English learners. Therefore, it is a trend for linguistic researchers to conduct relevant research.Such patterns like “a verb+a particle” and “a verb an object+a particle” are the two main forms to construct phrasal verbs. Gaining conclusion from previous researchers, in general, OUT is the most frequently used particle, and V+out is an abundant construction. Thus, it is of great value and necessity to do some research on it.In this paper, the author use database approach and quantitative analysis to conduct relevant study. And three questions related to the present paper are:(1) From the perspective of cognitive lingustics, what kinds of cognitive domains V+OUT construction contains?(2) What is the relationship between the basic image schema of particle OUT and V+OUT construction?(3) What are the polysemy characteristics of particle OUT and what are the implications for English teaching under such researches? In this paper, several cognitive linguistic theories are introduced to made analyses about the construction of meaning of V+OUT, which include prototype theory, conceptual theory, and image schema theory. Meanwhile, it is discovered that image schema transformation motivates polysemy mainly. By using COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English) as the study tool, the paper is a corpus-based study about V+out construction. And the data of the paper are quoted from COCA, which is a large, well-balanced and naturally occurring corpus. After quoted the first 200 frequently used phrasal verbs of V+out construction, it is natural to make classification about the domains. It is found that the senses of OUT contained two aspects: spatial meaning and metaphorical meaning of OUT. Most importantly, extensional meaning of out includes domain of state, range,event, result, disapproval and other cases. What is more, it is discovered that the features of out polysemy are from specialization from non-space. And space opposite feature is the general feature of polysemy about OUT. What is more, the author tried to make cognitive explanations about multi-meanings, pointing that the different source of meanings is from different cognitive stage in basic schema, which is the reflection of general meaning and universal feature. Different senses of the particle out are connected with each other and plenty of senses of V+OUT share the characteristics of Family Resemblance.Metaphorical thinking about the semantic meanings of V+out construction should be noticed when language learners learn and memorize these. With the guidance of prototype theory, conceptual theory, and image schema theory, it is believed that language learners can relatively make a better understand about metaphorical extensional meanings. Besides, the polysemous phenomenon still exists in V+out construction. In the end, it is expected that the paper can be helpful and meaningful for lexicographer to a certain degree.