The Study Of Coercion In Resultative Construction

Resultative construction, being a complex event combined by a causing event and a caused event, is a quite common sentence pattern in languages. Various studies about resultative construction have been done from different perspectives such as semantics, syntax, lexical relational structure, event structure or recently constructional grammar. Coercion, which is used to resolve conflicts between syntax and semantics traditionally, is viewed as a label for description rather than a mechanism for illustration. Coercion in resultative construction is analyzed in this thesis. Our study focuses on the following issues: manifestations of coercion in resultative construction; nature of coercion in resultative construction.Based on the Nuclear Stress Assignment Rule of Feng Shengli(1996), prosodic coercion which shows the interaction between syntax and prosody is put forward. We argue that V-R structures in resultative construction are coerced to be a word through clitic movement under the coercive effect of prosodic rules. Disyllables are the most popular candidates so that it can be freely combined in this construction. V-R structures with 3 or 4 syllables can hardly be coerced into a word in the structure as they can?t form a foot.From a cognitive viewpoint, coercion is combined with construal, action chain and language encoding to explain the argument realization in resultative construction. In agentoriented resultative construction, the agent of unergative verbs and transitive verbs is retained; at a more specific level, the implicit theme and result of unergative verbs and the implicit result of transitive verbs are coerced to be profiled. The fused agent, theme and result are then mapped into subject, object and oblique syntactically. In the theme-oriented resultative construction, the theme of unaccusative verbs is retained; at a more specific level, the implicit result of unaccusative verbs is coerced to be profiled, with the saturated theme and result being realized as subject and oblique respectively. The so-called argument augmentation doesn?t seem to really exist, it is just a way to show the capacity of accommodation of the construction.Coercion in resultative construction is studied both in form and in meaning. In terms of its nature, constructional coercion is actually the interaction between the selection of lexicon from the construction and the adjustment of the lexicon to the construction(lexicon satisfies the conditions of the construction). Coercion in this case can also be understood as a construal process based on the mechanism of salience. Being conducted from a quite innovative way, this study should be of great significance of future researches.