A Cognitive Construction Grammar Approach To Causative "De" Constructions

Causative "de" sentences,as a special type of Chinese sentences,have widely attracted many domestic scholars' attention.The study of causative "de" sentences can not only enrich the ontological study of causative "de" sentences,but also have practical implications to the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language and the acquisition of causative "de" sentences for foreign students.Many scholars at home have started to analyze the syntax and the semantics of causative "de" sentences since 1950s.However,previous studies mainly focus on their syntactic structure,the semantic orientation of verb or the semantic orientation of complement in them.For example,in previous studies,most scholars name�???????????�inserted causative"de" sentence in terms of its syntactic structure or call it backward causative "de" sentence in terms of verb's semantic orientation.Few scholars are devoted to discovering the forming motivations of such causative "de" sentences.Considering the deficiency,within the framework of cognitive linguistics,this thesis tends to reanalyze the syntactic and the semantic features of causative "de" sentences,and then reclassify causative "de" sentences based on their argument structure,syntactic and semantic features,and finally discuss the interaction of verb and construction in causative"de" sentences profoundly so as to give a better explanation to the forming motivations of such causative "de" sentences.Through the analysis of causative "de" sentences,several findings have come to light.(1)Causative "de" sentences are constructions with their own independent meaning--constructional meaning entailing causative sense,which is polysemous,that is,the constructional meaning of causative "de" sentences is a family of closely associated senses.(2)In the light of the argument structure,the syntactic and the semantic features of causative "de" constructions,causative "de" constructions can be mainly classified into four types:? prototypical causative "de" constructions indicating a kind of external,direct,and negative causation;? non-prototypical indirect causative "de" constructions conveying a kind of external,indirect,and negative causation;? non-prototypical external causative "de"constructions delivering a kind of external,unpredictable,negative,and reflexive causation? non-prototypical positive causative "de" constructions entailing a kind of positive causation etc.(3)The formation of prototypical and some non-prototypical causative "de"constructions reflects different interaction of verb and construction in causative "de"constructions.Firstly,the fusion of argument roles and participant roles one-to-one correspondingly motivates prototypical causative "de" constructions.Secondly,construction coercion mainly by the argument argumentation and the elevation of argument roles motivates some specific non-prototypical causative "de" constructions.In addition,there are two cognitive factors lying behind non-prototypical causative "de" constructions that pave construction coercion.One is subjectivity and subjectification,including speakers' perspective,affect and epistemic modality,and the other is metonymy and by metonymy those argument roles like patient,location and so on can replace the whole causing event and become the causer.