A CG-based Analysis Of The Idiom V One’s Head Off

This paper studies a peculiar English pattern V one’s head off, instantiated by laugh his head off, which is proved to be very productive since the verb laugh and the noun head can both be replaced by other words in a certain way. So this pattern can derive some other expressions, such as work my butt off, talk his head off, etc. Such expressionss are considered as idioms because of the non-compositionality of their interpretation. Through this study, the paper aims at analyzing the properties of such a pattern.The analysis of this idiom V one’s head off is based on the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar mainly proposed by Fillmore et al(1988), Fillmore& Kay(1999), Goldberg(1995, 2003, 2006), Langacker(1987), Taylor(2002), and Croft(2001).The study of this idiom includes the analysis of its syntactic, semantic and aspectual properties. By analyzing such properties in these three levels, the study mainly tries to prove that one aspect of this construction cannot be predicted from its parts or the combining of its parts and thus proves the existence of this construction.After having presented the properties of this construction, this paper also analyzes the causation of the peculiarities from the perspective of ideas that are concerned with the construction coercion.Through the analysis of this construction, this paper comes to several findings.Firstly, this structure proves to be peculiar as far as its syntactic, semantic and aspectual properties are taken into consideration. In particular, syntactically, the NP one’s head behaves syntactically like a direct object, even though it is clearly not licensed by the verb laugh, because laugh is absolutely an intransitive one and such kind of verbs evidently cannot be followed by nouns. The semantic peculiarity of the V one’s head off construction lies in the fact that the interpretation of the combination of NP and the particle off is just like the interpretation of an adverb which denotes an adverbial force intensely. Secondly, the aspectual property is that the VP is telic while the whole construction is atelic. Besides, this construction is shown to be distinct from English caused-motion and resultative constructions although it inherits the syntactic similarity from the two kinds, because it has some peculiarities of its own; such as its syntactic, semantic and aspectual properties. Thus, that is to say, the V one’s head offconstruction inherits the syntactic features from the caused-motion and resultative construction, but is not equal to them semantically and aspectually. Lastly, this construction contains a mismatch between the lexical items and the construction, and it is not possible to view it from the perspective of lexical rules; instead, such mismatches can be given an reasonable explanation through construction coercion.