A Study On English Caused-Motion Construction From The Perspective Of Conceptual Frame

Caused-motion construction is common in human beings' languages and considered as one of the important and frequent experiences,thus how to decode and encode caused-motion construction draws great attention from the linguists.There are several important theories frequently used to research caused-motion construction.The first one is the Projection Rules and the prominently representative ones are Lexical Grammar,Case Grammar,Transformational and Generative Grammar.The second one is Construction Grammar of which the representative is Goldberg.The third one is the Interactive Fusion View based on abundant conceptual semantic frameworks.These theories contribute enormously to the study of caused-motion construction but there is still controversy deserved further studying.This thesis tries to apply Conceptual Frame put forward by Cheng Qilong to study English caused-motion construction.This theory shows its advantages in both theoretical meaning and representation ability.In terms of theory,the conceptual framework believes that language is based on empirical knowledge which is connected to the motor and perception system.Conceptual Frame is a mental gestalt and has a physiological material basis.In terms of expressive ability,Conceptual Frame which expresses the multidimensional conceptual semantics can reasonably explain the semantic similarities and differences between the variants,the semantic features of the verb capable of entering variants and how the conceptual content connects the perceptual motion system.Conceptual Frame holds the Connectionist View: On the one hand,a conceptual frame is a decomposable gestalt.That is,a conceptual frame can be constructed by several conceptual structures and these conceptual structures are of semantic linkage;On the other hand,the construction and the verb in a tenable sentence are of semantic connection,which means they both express the same conceptual contents.Besides,most of the relative researches study caused-motion construction from the perspectives of syntactic or structural features,notional meaning of different verbs and polysemy of caused-motion construction or verbs.This study is going to research caused-motion construction in terms of causative force represented by causative verbs.This thesis concludes that caused-motion clauses caused by different causativeforce are reasonable because they all adhere to the Connectionist View.Caused-motion construction as an important structure independent in lexical meanings is as important as a verb in constructing a tenable clause.And the fusion between a caused-motion construction and a verb bases on the semantic linkage of their conceptual structures in the conceptual frames and the semantic connection between the verb and caused-motion construction.In addition,causative force represented by a verb contributes a lot to explaining the fusion process between caused-construction and a verb.Physical causative force is typically objective and common in our life,so the direction features of physical force provide strong evidence when studying the semantic connections of caused-motion constructions and abstract causative verbs.Further more,abstract causative verbs can be analyzed in more detail.The contributions of this study can be listed as follows: First,this study analyses the caused-motion construction with Cheng qilong's Conceptual Frame from the cognitive perspective.Compared with the one-dimensional semantic structure description of other cognitive linguistics,Conceptual Frame shows its prominent advantages in interpreting caused-motion constructions both in theory and the ability of interpretation.Second,this study tries to analyse caused-motion construction in terms of causative verbs representing different causative force and figure out the significance of causative force in researching the tenable conceptual process of caused-motion construction,semantic features of different causative verbs and semantic connection between caused-motion construction and causative verb.Third,this study provides a different study angle and thinking for relative studies and practices Conceptual Frame on the semantics of constructions,verbs' features and the fusion between constructions and verbs.This study shows that Conceptual Frame has obvious advantages in decoding and encoding caused-motion constructions and in interpreting the interactive relation between verbs and variants.