A Corpus-based Study On Rseudo-coordination

This exploratory study,based on Informational Theory and Construction Grammar,exploits pseudo-coordination experimentally from morphosyntactic and conceptual-pragmatic perspectives.It strives to uncover the dynamic transformation of pseudo-coordination and pinpoint its contributing factors to achieve some pedagogical implications.This corpus-based study examines pseudo-coordination through a variety of quantitative(distributions of pseudo-coordination)and qualitative analyses(conceptual-pragmatic interpretation)employing British National Corpus(BNC),with the purpose to fathom the interactive language-internal and language-external factors that contribute to the re-construction.And results are as follows:Firstly,quantitative results reveal that both verbal pseudo-coordination and adjective pseudo-coordination occur significantly frequently in spoken than in written corpora,and verbal pseudo-coordination tends to be restricted to their base form or infinitive forms.In addition,a closer examination of verbal pseudo-coordination(i.e.try-and-V construction)and its near-synonymous infinitive counterpart(i.e.try-to-V construction)reveals that they differ in perspectives of following facts:a)the environment of verbal pseudo-coordination has preferences for to-infinitives and modals;b)co-occurring subjects of verbal pseudo-coordination turn out to be actively-motivated or sentient persons(i.e.I,we,you,he,she,they,but excludes it);c)co-occurring verbs of verbal pseudo-coordination are in high likelihoods to be positioned in activity-ornented situations.Furthermore,a more minute examination of adjective pseudo-coordination(i.e.nice-and-A construction)finds out that it is entrenched strongly in the sequence of nice-and-A rather than ADJ-and-nice,and contextual unpredictable interpretation of nice-and as 'very,pleasingly' is becoming increasingly acknowledged.Within the framework of Principle of No Synonymy and Construction Grammar,this study proposes that pseudo-coordination is on its way to become an independent full-fledged construction transforming from syntactic coordination to conceptual-pragmatic modification.Accordingly,this corpus-based study of pseudo-coordination possess theoretical and practical significance.On one hand,a novel corpus-based methodology sheds light on future discovery and exploration of such marginal linguistic phenomena;on the other hand,a corollary of pseudo-coordination as an idiomatic 'construction' not only augments the system of extant grammar but also provides insights for pedagogical education and translation.