| The relationship between form and meaning has always been a hot topic in linguistic studies.One of the studies is construction grammar,which deals with their relationship from the perspective of constructions,defined as form-meaning pairings.As a case of form-meaning pairings,Body Part Off/Out Construction(i.e.BPOC)has the same syntax with the resultative construction,but differs in semantics.The latter one refers to ?result state,? while the former one conveys ?intensity,? which equals to degree adverbials.Therefore,it is a typical case of form-meaning mismatches.The peculiarities on the form and meaning of BPOC challenge our grammar system,and thus BPOC attracts the researchers‘ attention at home and abroad.Related studies are extended about the features of its form and meaning,and cognitive illustration of its meaning.Recently,the studies on BPOC show a tendency from formal description to cognitive explanation,and research method from relying on limited introspective data to corpus-based data.However,since the vague definition of BPOC,previous studies have controversies over the descriptions on this construction and the forming motivations.Besides,there are few investigations discussing the specific adverbial function of this construction denoting ?intensity?.Therefore,in order to investigate the syntactic and semantic features of BPOC,its forming motivation,and its typical function,this thesis makes an overall and detailed investigation from the perspective of construction grammar,combining conceptual metaphor theory and Force Change Schema in cognitive semantics,and construal in cognitive grammar.This study presents answers to the following three questions:(1)As a case of form-meaning mismatches,what are the syntactic and semantic properties of BPOC?(2)How are the mismatches of BPOC formed?(3)How does BPOC perform its function as a type of degree adverbial?In order to answer the questions,we collect data from COCA by retrieving the target construction BPOC in COCA,and screening out the qualified constructions.Through qualitative analysis and case study,we make an investigation about the syntactic and semantic feature,forming motivation and specific functions.The findings are shown as follows:(1)Syntactically,in BPOC,the verbs are restricted to atelic activity,and transitivity is not a decisive condition;possessive pronouns do not necessarily coindex with subjects,and non-coreferential relationship implies that the activity has an effect on others;body part nouns do not necessarily change with verbs,and taboo nouns(e.g.butt)disappear the conceptual association between them;Semantically,BPOC is attached with the interpretation ?do excessively,? and at the same time,corpus data prove the existence of its literal reading,i.e.X causes Y to move Z.Based on the syntactic and semantic features,BPOC is classified into two types,i.e.metaphorical BPOC and literal BPOC.In this classification,the former form belongs to idiomatic construction that borrows the syntactic pattern of the resultative construction while the latter form belongs to a subtype of the resultative construction.(2)Form-meaning mismatch of BPOC results from the cognitive mechanisms respectively.BPOC in idiomatic reading and literal reading has different forming motivation,leading to different semantic interpretation.The semantic reading of metaphorical BPOC results from conceptual metaphor.According to the metaphor formulated as ?(AN EXTREME)INTENSITY IS(AN EXCESSIVE)CHANGE OF LOCATION,? BPOC gets the intensifier reading.The activation of this metaphor makes the metaphorical form construed as a foreground against the literal form as the background.Differently,literal BPOC(i.e.the resultative construction)results from conceptual blending,and two events are integrated into a simple sentence,i.e.using the simple syntactic pattern to convey complex concepts,which reflects the cognitive economy.The syntactic pattern shared by both metaphorical and literal BPOC is realized via constructional inheritance.That is,metaphorical BPOC inherits literal BPOC via a metaphorical link,and the literal BPOC inherits resultative construction via instance link.Therefore,BPOC gets the syntactic pattern from inheriting that of resultative construction,in which process the movement of body part nouns is realized through fictive construal.To the hapaxes and creative expressions,they are proved to be created by taking conventional and established idiomatic constructions as a template and realized by analogy with them in order to avoid illegal expressions.(3)BPOC has two major functions: emphatic function and affective function.Emphatic function is realized by degree salience,which can be explained by one of the parameters of construal—specificity,that is,detailed expression is more salient and salient part is with higher specificity;affective function is realized by hyperbolic and counterfactual expression,which can be explained by the theory of subjectivity,that is,hyperbolic expressions with higher subjective level have more subjective color and affective tendency.Because of the two salient functions,BPOC is used in concrete contexts to satisfy the need of expression and cannot be replaced by more concise degree adverbials with similar meaning.In these ways does BPOC perform its adverbial functions.The results show language form and meaning do not show a relationship of one-to-one mapping,and human cognitive abilities affect linguistic behaviors.The syntactic and semantic forming of BPOC results from a series of cognitive activities.Besides,it confirmed that idiomatic expressions can be motivated,and linguistic behaviors take the bodily experience as the foundation.Human cognitive abilities affect language forms,and language forms in return reflect cognitive abilities. |
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