A Corpus-based Collostructional Analysis On Get+V-ed Construction

English get+V-ed has long been investigated.Owing to its uniqueness and complexity,it has been regarded as a ?linguistic puzzle? in the linguistic academia.In the meanwhile,it has received much attention among scholars both at home and abroad.The previous studies on get+V-ed mainly focus on its syntactic structure,semantic and pragmatic features as well as the comparative study with be+V-ed and so on.As the paradigm of constructional research springs up,a few studies have been conducted on get+V-ed based on construction grammar.Besides,there is an empirical and quantitative turn in linguistic study.However,introspection is still the primary approach to investigate get+V-ed.It is not sufficient for the in-depth study on this linguistic phenomenon.In view of aforementioned situations,the present study makes attempts to carry out an empirical investigation on a representative of get+V-ed,the get+V-ed with prototypical agent,labeled as get+V-ed by-agent construction,applying the COCA(The Corpus of Contemporary American English)as data source,aiming to make a comprehensive and detailed analysis on this linguistic phenomenon.The following three questions intend to be answered:1)What kinds of verbs in the past participle slot are more strongly associated with get+V-ed by-agent construction?2)What are the characteristics of the verbs occurring in the get+V-ed by-agent construction?3)What are the semantic features of get+V-ed by-agent construction?With the framework of construction grammar combined with usage-based theory,this paper makes use of collostructional analysis and cluster analysis and applies R software as analytical tool to calculate the collostruction strength between the past participle slot and the target construction.Afterwards,the semantic features of this construction are explored,and the formation mechanism behind the construction will be revealed.Ultimately,a scientific and systematic analysis on this linguistic phenomenon will be made.This study finds that:(1)According to the results of collostructional analysis,interaction does lie in collexemes in past participle slot and get+V-ed by-agent construction.The most significantly associated past participle with the target construction is bitten,followed by eaten,stung,paid,hammered,hit and so forth.There are 508 collexemes in the past participle slot in total,among which 506 collexemes have strong attraction with the target construction,and only 2 collexemes have repulsion relationship.Besides,291 out of 506 significantly associated collexemes are hapax legomenas.It is shown that the target construction is highly productive.(2)The parent verbs occurring in get+V-ed by-agent construction are diversified on the whole.But it still prefers certain types of verbs.Among the 506 parent verbs,contact verbs(21%),social behavior and interaction verbs(16%)as well as communication verbs(16%)account for large proportion.What‘s more,competition verbs,motion verbs,cognition verbs and possession verbs seldom occur.The rest types of verbs,namely,creation verbs,emotion verbs only appear sporadically.By analogy,more and more verbs appear in the target construction.Accordingly,the restrictions put on the verbs licensed in the given slot are lessened at the same time.(3)There are five semantic features of get+V-ed by-agent construction.First,the typical meaning of this construction is that ?subject is affected by agent.? By means of semantic clustering,the prototypical meaning of the target construction is found: ?subject is affected by agent through contact,? the other seven subsenses are that ?subject benefits from social activity affected by agent,? ?subject suffers something bad in the communication affected by agent,? ?subject goes through a defeat affected by agent,? ?subject has negative emotion affected by agent,? ?subject‘s possession has changed affected by agent,? ?subject has a motion affected by agent,? ?subject experiences something unpleasant in social activity affected by agent.? Second,the target construction has negative coloring,in other words,it is used to express adversity for the most part.Third,adverbs seldom occur in this construction,among which degree adverb is the main type.Fourth,most subjects in this construction are animate,especially,the words referring to human.Fifth,get+V-ed by-agent construction is frequently used in spoken English,followed by fiction,newspapers and popular magazines,and there is little difference between them.However,the target construction rarely occurs in academic journals.Out of frequent use in daily life,the target construction has entrenched gradually in mental grammar,which makes it possible to be widely used in different registers.In addition,the research finds that the formation mechanism of get+V-ed by-agent construction has a close relationship with cognitive construal,especially the concept of perspective.On the basis of a canonical event,the vantage point of a speaker changes from agent to patient.Then,patient is profiled and agent is demoted.On this score,the target construction comes into being.Besides,the subjectivity of speakers has an effect on perspective.Speakers intend to describe the resultative state of an event instead of the process,which contributes to the formation of this construction.In this study,get+V-ed is subsumed into constructional study,hoping to offer a brand-new perspective for this linguistic phenomenon.By virtue of quantitative and empirical analysis on authentic data,the characteristics of get+V-ed by-agent construction are disclosed,which enriches the relevant studies on get+V-ed construction.