A Contrastive Analysis Of English And Chinese Cognate Object Constructions With The Theory Of Construction Grammar

As a prevailing linguistic phenomenon in both English and Chinese,Cognate Object Constructions(COCs)have their distinct syntactic and semantic features.English COCs,which usually consist of intransitive verbs and cognate nouns,can be exemplified as follows:(1)a.Bob slept a sound sleep.b.John smiled a happy smile.(Iwasaki,2007: 1)As shown in the above examples,in an English COC,an intransitive verb takes as its object a noun phrase whose head is morphologically,etymologically and semantically related to the corresponding verb.The objects with this feature are thus regarded as Cognate Objects(COs).Different from English COCs,COCs in Chinese have more variants,and thus can be classified into the following three types according to the form of COs:Table 1 Different types of Chinese COCsNumerous studies have been carried out to probe into the morphological,syntactic,semantic,and pragmatic features of English COCs(Jones,1988;Moltmann,1989;Massam,1990;Macfarland,1995;Kuno & Takami,2004;Nakajima,2006;Sailer,2010)from various perspectives.Nevertheless,no consensus has been reached on many syntactic and semantic properties of English COCs,such as the syntactic status of COs.Besides,the constructional meaning of English COCs has never been touched upon.In contrast,Chinese COCs have not received as much attention as English COCs have.Only several researchers(Chao Yuanren,1968;Yan Liyu,1981;Pan Haihua & Ye Kuang,2015)define this linguistic phenomenon and give a brief introduction to the morphological,syntactic and semantic features of Chinese COCs.No further research has done to make a comprehensive analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of Chinese COCs.Therefore,based on data retrieved from Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),the corpus of CCL(Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU),and materials from previous research,this paper first defines English and Chinese COCs respectively,and then figure out the prototypical and non-prototypical COCs in English and Chinese separately in the light of the prototype theory.Moreover,in the framework of Goldberg's construction grammar,a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese COCs is carried out to explore their similarities and differences in terms of the constructional meaning of COCs and the semantic constraints on verbs and COs.The influential factors that may lead to the differences are also discussed.Major findings of the current study are listed as follows:(1)The central sense of English COCs is argued to involve a cause-existence relation between an agent and a patient,and it is claimed that COCs with unergative verbs tend to be prototypical COCs in English,while those with unaccusative verbs are non-prototypical ones.Moreover,the COs taken by unergative verbs are usually construed as a type of action or an entity and thus function as an argument,whereas the COs appear with unaccusative verbs are construed as an event.What's more,the construal of COs in COCs with unergative verbs may be influenced by the modification of COs.(2)Both transitive and intransitive verbs can appear in Chinese COCs,and the COs have several variants.According to the central sense of Chinese COCs,which is similar to that of English COCs,COCs containing a transitive verb and its nominal correspondence are prototypical Chinese COCs,while COCs with intransitive verbs and COCs consisting of a(3)transitive verb and other types of COs are non-prototypical ones.Moreover,COs in prototypical COCs are construed as an entity,while COs in non-prototypical ones are usually construed as an event.(4)English and Chinese COCs have similarities in constructional meaning,the construal of COs,and the requirement for modification.And the differences between English and Chinese COCs mainly lie in the semantic constraints on verbs and COs.(5)The factors that may result in the differences between English and COCs can be concluded as the distinct syntactic properties and configurational features that each of the two languages has.This contrastive analysis of English and Chinese COCs reveals that although the prototypical COCs in English and Chinese have similarities in constructional meaning and some syntactic and semantic features,Chinese COCs are more diverse than English COCs.Further research on the syntactic and semantic properties of Chinese COCs and the contrast between English and Chinese COC is expected.