Cognitive Analysis Of Different Semantic Constraints Of Synomymous Resultative Constructions

Based on the Cognitive Construction Grammar, this thesis investigates the factors that affect the constraints of two synonymous resultative constructions, with "V-Ge-XP" and "V-De-XP" as examples. Although previous studies noticed the difference between "V-Ge-XP" and "Ve-De-XP" resultative constructions, they did not probe the constructive meaning of these two resultative constructions, the interaction between constructional meaning and lexical meaning, and the motives of these differences. That's what motivates the present study.The corpus chosen for the present study is National language Committee Corpus (CNCorpus). From this corpus, "V-Ge-XP" resultative construction and "V-De-XP" resultative construction have been selected as the object of study. By contrastive observation of those sentences, this study finds that these two seemingly synonymous resultative constructions are different in constructional meaning and the interaction between constructional meaning and meaning of its constituents. Based on the exploration of constraints of these two constructions, this study analyzes the motivation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Through analysis of linguistic data, this thesis figures out the differences between "V-Ge-XP" and "V-De-XP" resultative constructions, and three cognitive factors which govern semantic constraints:subjectivity, event construction and pragmatic factors. "V-Ge-XP" resultative construction highlights the subjectivity and eventuality, while "V-De-XP" resultative construction does not highlight the subjectivity and eventuality. In terms of pragmatics, "V-Ge-XP" resultative construction expresses the focus status and polarity of "XP", while "V-De-XP" resultative construction does not have this restriction. At last, this thesis discusses the impact of nested construction to different use of "V-Ge-XP" and "V-De-XP" resultative construction.With "V-Ge-XP" and "V-De-XP" resultative construction as examples, this thesis try to reveal the cognitive factors that impact a pair of resultative constructions with similar meaning. The above findings indicate that subjectivity, event structure and pragmatic factors are the main three factors that constrain the use of "V-Ge-XP" and "V-De-XP". It sheds some light on the explanatory power of cognitive linguistics and provides implications on contrastive study of resultative construction.