A Corpus-based Study On The Grammatical Constructionalization Of Existential There-construction

In the late 1970 s, with the development of cognitive linguistics, especially the theory of cognitive construction grammar, people have some new ideas about there-construction which is the common grammatical phenomenon in English language. In 1987, in the book named Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Lakoff took the lead in regarding there-construction as an independent grammatical construction, which means that it is a form- meaning pairing. What’s more, he also points out that there-construction consists of deictic there-construction and existential there-construction. The central existential there construction is based on the central deictic there construction. There is a continuum between them(Lakoff, 1987, p. 541). Over the past thirty years there-construction has become more and more popular among linguists at home and abroad. Functionalists regard it as existential clause, which is one of processes in the network of transitivity system, existential process( Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, P.256-259). Zhang Keding puts forward the hypothesis that there-construction is a TtFG structure from the cognitive perspective(2007, P. 81). O f those, the relationship between deictic there-construction and existential there-construction is always a hot topic. The diachronic study provides a new idea for this relationship. For example, Jenset(2008, p. 59) points out that existential there developed historically from deictic there based on the diachronic study, which is widely accepted. However, exactly how this development came about is disputed.In order to further understand the relationship between deictic there-construction and existential there-construction, we assume that there-construction experiences the process of constructionalization and constructional changes and there are different features in different historical development periods. Specifically, this paper attempts to answer the following three questions:(1) In O ld English period, is the deictic use of there in a dominant position? If there were the existential use of there, is it a margin phenomenon?(2) In Middle English period, does the grammatical constructionalization of existential there-construction happen? After constructionalization, does its productivity change correspondingly?(3) In the early English period, what are the mechanism and motivation of the grammatical constructionalization of existential there-construction?In order to answer above questions, this paper analyzes the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of existential there-construction based on the methods of combining the quantitative study with qualitative study from the perspective of constructionalization and constructional changes postulated by Traugott and Trousdale(2013), which takes grammatical constructionalization as a starting point based on the data collected from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. The research findings are presented as following:(1) In O ld English period, we find that the deictic use of there is in a dominant position and its proportion is relatively large(93.76%). Although in this period there are some tokens with the existential use of there, the ratio of this use is very low(1.51%). According to the study of some instantiations of the existential use of there, we find that there has the function of subject and is meaningful.(2) The proportion of the existential use of there has been greatly increased, compared with that in Old English. In addition, the syntactic feature of existential there-construction in this period is THERE+V+(NP), in which there functions as a subject. In this pattern, the verb be is the most frequent, which appears 196 times. Based on the study of the classification of verbs by Levin(1993), we classify the verbs immediately following existential there and then find that two types of verbs with high frequent is existence verb and psychological state verb, which means that the semantic feature of existential there-construction is related with existence and psychological state. Then through the study of instantiations, we find that the pragmatic feature of existential there-construction is to focus the hearer ’s awareness on the existence of an event or an entity. Based on the study of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of existential there-construction, we find that the constructionalization of existential there-construction exists in Middle English.(3) Regarding to the productivity of existential there-construction after its constructionalization in Early Modern English, we find that its productivity also changes. On the one hand, we find that the frequency of there is higher than that in Middle English and there is an obvious tendency in the token frequency of existential there-construction in Early Modern English. There are totally 2151 tokens with there, of which 726 is the deictic use and 1415 is the existential use. There are 1083 tokens with the pattern THERE+V+(NP), in which the verb of be is 922. O n the other hand, the type frequency of existential there-construction also changes in Early Modern English period. On the basis of classification statistics of the verbs immediately following existential there, we find that there are 25 verb types which are more than these in Middle English. There appear ten new verb types in this period. So no matter from token frequency or type frequency, the productivity of existential there-construction increases in the period of Early Modern English.(4) Analogical thinking and analogization are respectively the main motivation and mechanism of the emergency(constructionalization) of existential there-construction. Pragmatically, existential there-construction is analogized with deictic there-construction. Semantically, it is analogized with existential construction. Syntactically, it is analogized with copular construction, transitive and intransitive constructions. Because of analogical thinking, the hearer can analogize existential there-construction with extant constructions in his or her constructional network based on the best fit principle in order to find the bes t syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features to match it.The above findings can not only provide methodology for the latter study of there-construction but also bring enlightenment for the diachronic study of construction grammar.