| Way Construction as a special language structure in English is relatively complicated and has attracted great attention from many scholars.Actually,the construction is not new for English speakers,from 15~thh century,the structure is primarily formed with the help of make(Sullivan,2007),and has become more and more productive and evolved.The syntactic form is represented as[SUBJi[V[POSSi way]OBL]](Goldberg,1995).According to the previous studies and the practical contexts,Way Construction can be interpreted semantically as the implication of the subject referent moves along the path created or designated by the prepositional phrase and the constructional meaning is not predictable from the combination of all lexical items and other established structures.Where the verb is no longer the core leading component for an expression,as a result,the construction is a typical example of form-meaning correspondences.For the sake of understanding the forming mechanism of Way Construction,a few approaches have been carried out,such as sentences'fusion and transforming(Salkoff,1988),derivation from idioms(Jackendoff,1990),Construction Grammarapproach(Goldberg,1995),diachronicinvestigation(Israel,1996),metaphorical perspective(Sullivan,2007),image schema(Mondorf,2011),etc..From all those studies,Construction Grammar is more suitable for analyzing the construction,and it is admitted that Way Construction as a complicated construction and the existence of the construction has been proved.However,during the research,Construction Grammar is not sufficient enough to explain some features of Way Construction,therefore,the thesis adopts Construction Grammar together with other cognitive theories such as Conceptual Event Lexicalization Pattern,categorization,coercion theory,in order to fruit a thorough researching results of the construction.The thesis aims at explaining the inner motivation of the growth and evolution,as well as offering a comprehensive description of the construction under the cognitive framework,and providing a comprehensive study on the construction.As the starting point,the thesis introduces the formation of Way Construction and the proper interpretation of it.Secondly,as the core composition of the construction,the characteristics of the verbs accepted by Way Construction is focused on in the study with the help of Conceptual Event Lexicalization Pattern theory.Then coercion theory is adopted for analyzing the reason of the semantic meaning forming of the construction,since the constructional meaning can not be understood by referring to the lexical meanings of the constitution parts.Lastly,from categorization perspective,the thesis tries to find out the reason why Way Construction is so productive and widely applied in diverse contexts.To achieve the research aims successfully,and to fruit a more authentic and correct result,the current study takes Corpus of Contemporary American(COCA)as the source of data collection,which is a comprehensive corpus contains all aspects of language usages such as news,fictions,TV series and so on.With total 1200up-to-date examples,the thesis is able to get to the using status of Way Construction and the verbs selection as well as different interpretations in various contexts.With the support of authentic data,it is found that Way Constructions covers almost half of the collected sentences from COCA where way occurs,and the study on the construction has benefits not only in this language phenomenon but also in exploration of human cognition mechanism.Way Construction,as been observed previously,can be divided into three interpretations,means interpretation,manner interpretation,and incidental activity interpretation.From them,means interpretation is observed as the dominating interpretation both in number and as a prototype of Way Construction.Means interpretation puts emphasis on the path creation and generally entails the obstacle diminishing in the process of motion,and the method of moving is implied by means of the verb.Manner interpretation shows the manner of achieving the movement which is not the direct action of path creation.However,incidental activity is the accompanying actions taking place together with the displacement.According to the syntactic standards,in order to form a correct Way Construction,the verbs should be intransitive and unergative,and the Poss-way part is the mark and the motivation of the syntactic formation of the construction which is neither dividable nor replaceable.In addition,the prepositional phrase in the construction can be every thing but locative PP,and this part is acceptable to reduce to a preposition in an appropriate context and it is also equipped the capacity of the extension to other cognitive domains more than just spacial domain.Semantically,the verb is required to be construed as a process,and the motion indicated by the verb should be self-initiated,furthermore,the motion needs to contain clear direction and aimless motions are usually dissatisfied.Because of the blank left by both syntactic and semantic constrains,Talmy's theory of Conceptual Event Lexicalization Pattern is referred.From which,it is observed that the most indispensable feature of the selected verb is unboundedness.The thesis applies coercion theory to explain the motivation of the semantic meaning formation.It is believed that construction coercion,lexical coercion,and inertia coercion mechanisms enable the finally wholesome meaning to be represented by Way Construction.For the productivity of Way Construction,it is more acceptable to regard the construction as a categorization network.Laterally,the abstract schematic constructional meaning metaphorically expands from spatial path creative motion to temporal movement,therefore,greatly broaden the range of cognitive event indicated by the construction,and guarantees the precondition of further production.Vertically,on the basis of the former evolution,the selected verbs undergo a metonymic process where they expand from specific path creation activity to other conceptual structures of motion event.From the authentic collected data and study of Way Construction,cognitive linguistic framework is proved to be valid in analyzing the construction.And with the continuous growth and evolving of Way Construction,the great power of human's cognitive capacity has been witnessed,which also supports the scientific value of cognitive theories in other language usages. |
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