A Contrastive Study On English And Chinese Reduplicative Pluractional Construction Under The Perspective Of Cognitive Construction Grammar

As an important branch of cognitive linguistics,Construction Grammar has undergone considerable development during the recent years.The leading researcher Goldberg defines construction as a pairing of meaning and form.There is a well-established and constantly growing international community of scholars who have been pursuing the Construction Grammar to linguistic analysis,which has its historical roots in Berkeley and particularly in the work of Charles Fillmore.The purpose of this thesis is to provide an information resource that will keep track of new developments in constructional research and also promote discussion and collaboration among linguists interested in applying and further extending the constructional approach.Reduplicative Pluractional Constructions is an important semantic concept that is ubiquitous in human language.Reduplicative pluractional constructions(RPCs)which are represented by “comparative degree and comparative degree” in English,“yue lai yue ” in Chinese have aroused linguists’ intensive interest.This paper conducts a contrastive study of English and Chinese RPCs under the framework of Constructional Grammar with data collected from Modern Chinese corpus(BCC)and Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),focusing on the investigation of English“comparative degree and comparative degree” constructions and Chinese “yue lai yue”constructions in attempt to provide some implications for second language teaching and translation studies.Specifically,the present study aims at investigating the following questions:1.What are the characteristics of Chinese “yue lai yue” and English “comparative degree and comparative degree” within the theoretical framework of Goldberg’s CG? What are the similarities and differences between them? What can be revealed from the discrepancies?2.What is the semantic collocation and part of speech choice of English and Chinese Reduplicative Pluractional Constructions?Through analysis of the data retrieved from the two corpora,this paper provides the major findings as follows: There are many similarities between English,“comparative degree and comparative degree ” and Chinese “yue lai yue”,but there are also differences.The expression of “comparative degree and comparative degree” is more diversified.Theenlightenment on English teaching is that,in the course of teaching,the teaching should be flexible,giving the students enough knowledge of the language so that the constructions can be used freely.