| Starting with the semantic interaction between Chinese middle construction "S+V-qi lai+AP" and action verbs, this thesis conducts a research on the semantic selection restrictions of this construction on verbs guided by Fillmore's Frame Semantics and Talmy's Conceptual Structure theory. This thesis collects instances of Chinese middle construction from online modern Chinese corpus developed by National language committee, calculates the collostructional strength between verbs and construction using collostructional analysis and determines its typical meaning: expression of property of objects, while verbs identify fictive motion means expressed by CMC, attributes of objects are activated in such fictive motion. Thus verbs make CMC more vivid and dynamic. Since the meaning of verbs is not inseparable, and verbs are self-insufficient, their meaning depends on semantic components of them and event types expressed by them. Through analysis of the two aspects, three constraints on verbs are proposed:1) verbs must have the potentiality of expressing durable events; 2) course of action is foregrounded; and 3) the verbs must have specific active strength. Seen from these features, verbs and CMC are in a complex interrelationship:on the one hand, they are semantically correlated, course of action stressed by verbs and the meaning of fictive motion implicit in CMC; on the other hand, there exist semantic conflicts between them:dynamic state of verbs and static state of CMC, so motivations of shifts, blends and nesting are proposed for this. Shifts are about the changes made by verbs in order to be more compatible with CMC. Blends involve accommodation of two domains:dynamic domain of time and static domain of space. Nesting is about the chaining of attention. Blend and nesting are not completely irrelevant; they together play roles in cognitive interpretation. These motivations reflect interaction between verbs and CMC in a better way. |
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