A Diachronic Study Of The Metaphorization Of XYZ Construction

XYZ construction is one of the old but newly-developed construction combinations.Since Aristotle set about to investigate the syntactic features of XYZ construction,foreign scholars' research on XYZ construction gradually started.First,Brook-Rose(1958)and Tuner(1987)made a preliminary analysis on syntactic feature and semantic elements of XYZ construction,but they did not make the investigation from construction approach.With the rise and development of cognitive linguistics,in particular the maturity of construction grammar,scholars home and abroad gradually paid much attention on XYZ construction.For example,from the perspective of blending theory,based on the diversity of semantic elements in XYZ construction,Dancygier & Sweeter(2014)found its processing method and argued that XYZ construction can be divided into Predicational Copula Construction and Specificatonal Copula Construction.Moreover,due to the universality of metaphorization for XYZ construction,Sullivan(2007b,2013)also did research on its syntactic feature and metaphor mechanism.According to the differences in domains evoked by semantic elements,Sullivan(2013)divided metaphorical XYZ construction into TST type and TSS type.As shown in the above research,XYZ construction is a very productive one which have both different forms and comparatively semantic mechanism.It is found from the above study that the previous research seldom touched upon diachronic level but mainly focus on introspective descriptive research to interpret the syntactic and semantic feature of XYZ construction.That is to say,the research has not been out of synchronic level and no empirical research has been conducted with the aid of corpus.Therefore,in order to further investigate the forms and semantic generative mechanism of XYZ construction,we accepted Sullivan's(2003)thought about metaphorization of XYZ construction,and held the view that the metaphorization of XYZ construction is the result of pragmatics and was related to the cognitive factors of construction users.In order to verify the above hypothesis,using COHA as the data source and taking Sullivan's metaphor evocation pattern,usage-based theory and constructionalization as main theoretical foundation,this thesis devoted to carrying on the diachronic research on the metaphorization of XYZ construction with the help of R software.The followingthree questions are aimed to be solved:(1)As a constructional combination,what is the motivation of the existence of XYZ construction in English language history?(2)How does the metaphorical XYZ construction evolve in English language?(3)Whether there are differences in the evolution trend of two types(TST type and TSS type)of the metaphorical XYZ construction in English language history ? If so,why? For the sake of answering the above questions,this thesis,combining qualitative analysis method,adopts quantitative corpus analysis method to obtain exhaustive statistical data and further analyzes and illustrates the characteristics of the data corpus.This study finds that:(1)The motivation of the existence of XYZ construction is related to the usage frequency of its sub-constructions,NP be NP construction and preposition phrase construction.The statistics show that the emergence of the XYZ construction is the result of a new node which inheritances the features of syntactic,semantic and other features from its subparts,NP be NP construction and preposition phrase construction,by a succession of micro-steps.(2)By operating the VNC,this thesis obtains five time clusters in the development of metaphorical XYZ construction,and they are 1810 s,1820s,1830 s,1840s-1890 s and 1900s-2000 s.1810s sees the lowest tokens frequency for metaphorical XYZ construction.Since 1820 s,the increasing rate of tokens frequency rises very rapidly,particularly 1840s-1890 s sees the fastest increasing rate of tokens frequency.In 1900s-2000 s,its increasing rate is still apparently faster than 1810 s,1820s and 1830 s,although it gradually decreases.(3)Three differences exist in diachronic evolution process between TST type and TSS type of metaphorical XYZ construction: first of all,the VNC result of TST type is different from that of TSS type.The periodization result of TST type shows four time clusters,which are 1810 s,1820s,1830s-1890 s and 1900s-2000 s,and the periodization result of TSS type is another four time clusters,which are 1810 s,1820s-18300 s,1840s-1880 s and 1890s-2000 s.Secondly,the proportion of TST type in metaphorical XYZ construction is obviously larger than TSS type.Thirdly,the evolution trend of TST type and TSS type is different in clustering time.First,TST type emerges before TSS type in English language history.Second,the difference in tokens frequencybetween TST type and TSS type becomes smaller and smaller in 1900s-2000 s as time goes on since in 1900s-2000 s the increasing rate of tokens frequency in TST type decreases obviously but TSS type reaches the fastest increasing rate although before1900s-2000 s the increasing rate of TST type is faster than TSS type.The following reasons can explain the above differences: first,TST type emerges before TSS type due to the high complexity of metaphor evocation pattern in TSS type,which results in the popularity of usage in TST type;second,compared with TSS type,TST type evokes more source domains which lead to its more tokes frequency because the type of source domain evoked by one construction positively correlates with its tokens frequency;third,as time goes on,source domain prefers to be evoked by two or more than two lexical items,whereas target domain tends to be evoked by one lexical item,so since1890 s,the difference in tokens frequency between TST type and TSS type gradually becomes smaller.This thesis hopes to discuss the metaphorization and diachronic evolution of XYZ construction by quantitative analysis of real data.Integrating Construction Grammar with Conceptual metaphor and adopting the new perspective of diachronic Construction Grammar,this thesis will investigate and reveal the generative mechanism of XYZ construction,the diachronic evolution of its tokens frequency as well as the evolution characteristics of its metaphoric items and to some extent inject new energy into the metaphor research on Construction Grammar approach.