The Study Of Locative Construction Based On Space And Dynamics

The reasons for selecting this topic ar e as follows: Firstly,as a new theory,construction grammar provides us a new pe rspective to observe and study language.Moreover,the hypothesis of ‘construction' and ‘construction gramm ar' widens the scope of grammar study and other fields of linguistic study.This paper takes the locative construction as the res earch object,because the locative construction plays an important role in the construction grammar.The two a lternative forms of the locative construction,namely the conten t-locative construction and the co ntainer-locative construction are two ways of construing one event.The conversion of the two lo cative constructions,as m atter of fact,uncovers the gestalt shift in th e classic face-vase illusion in which the figure and the ground can shift in one's consciousness.Accordingly,the study of locative construction reveals in fact the human's thinking modes.Secondly,in the past,the study on construction mainly focuses on construction meaning,with less attention to lexical meaning.Therefore,this paper focuses on the analysis of verbs in the locative construction.W e can fi nd that di fferent verbs cause dif ferent locative constructions.Some verbs can make the content moved,but some verbs can m ake the state of container changed,and there are also some verbs can cause the content to move and the container to change state at the sam e time.Based on this discovery,this paper chooses the dynamic image schema and PATH image schema as the theoretical basis to conduct an in-depth research on the content's movement and container's state change from the perspective of force and spatial dimension.Based on the force dynam ic image schema,the study concludes that,first,if the use of a verb causes the content to move,then this verb can get into the content-locative construction.Second,if the use of a verb cause s the container to change state,then this verb can get into the container-locative construction.Third,if the use of a verb causes the content to move and the container to chan ge state at the sam e time,then this verb can be accepted by the two locative constr uctions.Based on the P ATH image schema,the study concludes that,first,if the use of a verb causes the content to move around a container or a surface along one-d imensional path,then this verb can get in to the content-locative construction.Second,if the us e of a verb causes the content to m ove within a container along three-dimensional path,then this v erb can be accepted by the two locative constructions.All in all,the structure of physics and geom etry behind a verb plays an important role in the integration between verbs and constructions.As far as the theoretical contribution is concerned,firstly,our study introduces the dynamic image schema and the P ATH image schema into the study of locative construction for the first time.As a result,it provides the relevant studies at home with a brand new perspective.Secondly,as m atter of fact,what our study on English constructions uncovers is the hum an's thinking mode at bottom.As for the practical value,the study contributes to learners' ability of English c onstruction acquisition,especially for the college English learn ers,because it en ables them to com prehend theoretically the English constructions.