Research On Meaning Construction In “It+be+adj” Construction By A Corpus-Based Approach

Impersonal Construction(IC)as a ubiquitous language phenomenon exists in every language,it reflects the way of human beings how to conceptualize event,and expresses the static property and abstractness of constructional meaning.The research of IC can be traced back to the 19 th century,which started from Indo-European and extended to other languages.It has always been a hotspot in linguistic studies.With a long history research on the IC,gratifying and significant results have been achieved.But the weakness of this study is that there is no longer a unified boundary in each language family,every school has its own thoughts.At the same time most of the researches are on descriptive perspective and lack of empirical corpus to surport.The nature of IC is a kind of Abstract Cognitive Reference Point Construction.It usually make up by “It +Verb+X”,and adjectives,nouns,or verbs is the main predication in the sentence to highlight the static concept of events.This dissertation attempts to Construction Grammar perspective and according to the existing classification method of the Impersonal Predicate and Impersonal Reference to start the research.As for the research method is to use British National Corpus(BYU-BNC)as the source corpus,which is a momentous and objective kind of quantitative analysis.By surveying the classification of predication in this construction,it finds that the adjective as expected predication accounting for a large proportion.So in this dissertation,the “It+be+adj” construction is used as an example to analysis the collocation and meaning construction of IC.There are many analysis about “It+be+adj” as a sentence pattern in different perspective such as semantic,function and syntactic traditionally,this research is based on the Construction Grammar,it maintained that “It+be+adj” as a kind of construction,and focused the point of view of meaning and form to analysis the adjective collocation and meaning construction.Besides,it finds out that adjective as the centre word in predication in correspondence with the construction in semantics such as the meaning of judgment and subjective emotion,evaluation.And in the characteristic of semantic,it both have the nature of static and conceptualization.What's more,by detailed analyzing the meaning construction of “It+be+adj” construction,it is clear that the stative relation expressed by the target adjectives reveals their connections to the stativity of the construction.Lexcion only provides a path to the conceptual knowledge structure,which does not have a definitional meaning.The basic concepts of these lexical semantics provide the basis for the interaction between them.In hence,the prototype structure of the IC emphasizes the static event scene type,describing the general conceptualization of a target entity in the abstract cognitive field,and the adjective is mainly used to describe the static scene and state of the event.Adjective helps the “It+be+adj” Construction to built the meaning construction in integrity and reference generalization.There are five sections of this thesis,they are introduction,literature review at home and aboard,theoretical framework of this study,collocation analysis of predication on “It+be+adj” construction and the meaning construction,conclusion respectively.This dissertation is aimed to explore the nature of lexcion and its collocation in “It+be+adj” construction,so as to find out the general collocation rules in “It+be+adj” construction can be applied to teaching English grammar,but also on the ordinary language learning.For second language acquisition research and translation,it can be also provide some guiding significance.It has both theoretical and practical values.