Constructing Unconventional English Resultatives From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending

Resultatives are syntactic constructions which express “an entity acts an action which causes the entity itself or other things to change the state”. English resultatives are constituted by verbs denoting action and complements filled by adjective or prepositional phrases indicating state. They embody great diversity in syntax and semantics. In syntactic level, traditional grammar states that the resultatives expressing cause-and-effect require transitive verbs plus objects. This rule is violated in some unconventional English resultatives as intransitive verbs are transitivized with the objects. In semantic level, in some unconventional English resultatives, the objects following the verbs are not the logical ones rising from the literal meaning. The special transitivity and the form-meaning discrepancy of English resultatives have been the research focus in theoretical linguistics.In recent years, linguists have investigated English resultatives from syntactic structure, lexical semantic, constructional grammar and event structure. The syntactic approach neglects the semantics and event structures of resultatives while emphasizing constraints of direct objects. In response to the insufficiency of some constraints, this approach may result in over-generation. Motivated by these problems, the lexical semantic approach explores semantic constraints on verbs in resultatives, but the analyses on microscopic level are difficult to constrain the semantics of verbs. Similarly, both syntactic and lexical semantic approaches discuss the argument of resultatives by focusing on the verb semantics. Different from these two approaches, constructional approach and event structure models concentrate on constructional semantics. According to cognitive mechanisms of causative events, they distinguish the argument structures in the lexical semantic and constructional levels. Specifically, Goldberg puts forward the causative constraints that the verbal arguments must fuse into the constructional arguments, whereas her constraints are not fully all-around. Boas regards that the patient is the argument in a resultative event structure, however, the judgment of patient cannot stand away from personal intuitive knowledge. Accordingly, it is difficult to generalize the acceptedstandards to weigh the quality of encyclopedic knowledge. Later, Langacker adopts constructional schema to present the semantic blending of intransitive verbs and transitive verbs that share similar meanings, however, he does not elucidate the association of the schema and target. All of these approaches have demonstrated certain explanatory adequacy,however, some problems are not fully accounted for in terms of dynamic discourse combination, syntactic and semantic blending and cognitive function.To solve the problems mentioned above, the author analyzes “Vi + NP” and fake object unconventional resultatives, within the framework of Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory. The thesis classifies the unconventional resultatives into four groups in the light of semantic selection between verbs and objects, “Vt + NP”unconventional resultatives, reflexive resultatives, implied objects resultatives and unspecified objects resultatives. Then each selected typical construction is analyzed within conceptual blending.The foregoing analysis leads to following conclusions: First, like conventional resultative constructions, unconventional resultatives are also based on embodied realism.Specifically, the constructing of unconventional resultatives includes the conceptual blending of grammar and semantics. The blending space can be formed through establishing grammatical space and schematic events space and operating cross-space projection and mappings. Eventually, the resultatives are constructed. The different highlights of information, projection and mapping mechanisms give rise to the diversity of resultatives. This also provides theoretical explanation for “Vi + NP” and fake object resultatives. Second, categorization of transitive verbs also plays an important part in the syntactic-semantic blending of “Vi + NP” resultatives. Furthermore, since some fake object resultatives embody the metonymic characteristics, they can be interpreted from the perspective of metonymy. The author then combines grammatical metonymy in the conceptual blending analyses of resultatives, which is beneficial to expound the form-meaning discrepancy of fake object resultatives. Third, the conceptual blendingprocess cannot be separated from our knowledge system. In the meantime, the blending process helps build knowledge system as well as developing language proficiency. As human general cognitive ability, conceptual blending analysis not only fully explains the construction and construal of unconventional resultatives, but also verifies the hypothesis that language ability comes from general cognitive ability in the cognitive linguistics.