A Study On The Relationship Between Productivity And Inheritance Of English It-Cleft Construction

English it-cleft construction is a high-profile,unique but common type of syntactic structure served to single out one particular element of the utterance by bringing it into focus.Jucker argues that it-cleft construction in English has always been a testing ground for linguistic frameworks?Jucker,1996,p.699?,which demonstrates that it-cleft construction plays an essential part in language theoretical construction and linguistic studies.In fact,much attention has been paid to the researches of it-cleft construction,and the earliest study can be traced back to around 1920s.Previous work on it-cleft construction resides in its structural and functional aspects and places extra emphasis on its syntactic structure and information and discourse functions.Coming to the 21^st century,the studies show a cognitive turn and begin to describe its semantic,pragmatic and cognitive phenomena.These researches,however,put too much emphasis on its idiosyncratic features and no enough attention is paid to the network structure and organizational relationship of it-cleft construction.Various constructions share complex relations with their own constructional network?Goldberg,1995;Traugott&Trousdale,2013?,and cleft constructions are no exception.We argue it-cleft construction is a complex and organized inheritance network system.There are multiple inheritance links and link changes among network nodes,and these links and link changes may have an impact on the expansion and contraction of it-cleft construction network,and may also influence the path and change ways shown in the process of expansion and contraction of the network.In order to verify the hypotheses mentioned above,we combine the usage-based model and the constructionalization theory to establish a theoretical framework of construction grammar with the core concepts of inheritance,productivity and coercion.This thesis is specifically addressed to the following three questions:?1?How is the inheritance network of it-cleft construction formed,and what are the characteristics during the formation??2?Does the inheritance network of it-cleft construction change during its diachronic development and how does it change??3?What are the reasons behind the changes of the inheritance network of it-cleft construction?In order to answer the questions above,we,firstly,establish a closed corpus by extracting eligible data from COHA and COCA corpus.After that,the thesis,on the basis of the statistics and analysis,adopts the methodology of mixed research,i.e.the integration of documentary research approach and corpus-based approach,together with Chi-square software,to examine every construction from up to bottom,outline the hierarchies and draw the diachronic inheritance network diagram.At last,this study,based on the interior of it-cleft construction,probes into the relationship between its productivity and the changing inheritance network.The main research findings are demonstrated as follows:?1?The it-cleft construction together with its superordinate and subordinate constructions forms an inheritance network through default inheritance link and instance link.English it-cleft construction is a typical type of NP1 be NP2 copular construction,which means that this construction exists and develops from the constructional network of the copular construction.Meanwhile,these two superordinate constructions correspond to two superordinate constructions,i.e.specificational copular construction and predicational copular construction respectively.During the process of constructing inheritance network of it-cleft construction,the subordinate constructions of it-cleft construction inherit some properties from their own superordinate construction respectively,forming the default inheritance link for the first place.As regards to syntactic structure,the cleft pronoun it and cleft clause form a continuous constituent which equals to the element of NP1 and then forms an equivalence relationship with copular constructions syntactically.In terms of the meaning,the construction meaning of specificational construction—exhaustive identification—roots in the combination of the identifying function of the copular verb be and the unique referring function of the variable in specificational constructions since the variable of this type in constructions is more like a definite description.It-cleft construction inherits the meaning of“exhaustive identification”of specificational constructions by the vertical inheritance of the schema.What's more,it-cleft construction bears its unique meaning of“exclusive identification”since it is usually served to make contrastive focus.Then the constructional meaning of it-cleft construction can be further generalized into“exclusive and exhaustive identification”.Meanwhile,the subordinate constructions of it-cleft construction and its superordinate counterparts form the inheritance network through the instance link.Specificational and predicational it-cleft construction as a particular instance of specificational and predicational copular constructions respectively include some basic characteristics of their superordinate ones,but also possess their own features.?2?The inheritance network of it-cleft construction,mainly specificational it-cleft construction,shows a trend of diachronic expansion,during which it-cleft construction experiences the grammatical constructionalization,behaved mainly in host-class expansion and semantic class expansion.To be specific,as for the former,clefted constituent has extended from noun phrase to prepositional?PP?,adjective?AdjP?,adverbial phrase?AdvP?since the 1810s,which has strengthened the schema of it-cleft construction,contributing to the formation of non-NP-focus it-cleft construction schema.On the part of the semantic class expansion,the it-cleft construction,in the preliminary stage?1810-1840?,showed a preference for focusing the entities,such as proper names of individuals.Over time less discrete entities,such as abstract nouns and foci bearing relational meaning has occurred after 1840 and show a growth trend.?3?Productivity,as the internal side of the schema coin,is the main reason for its expansion.On the one hand,type frequency triggers the category expansion of the clefted constituent,and the non-nominal types can be entrenched into a higher level construction,i.e.non-NP-focus it-cleft construction.On the other hand,token frequency promotes the horizontal expansion of the inheritance network.Maintaining in a relatively high and stable token frequency,the lower level constructions are able to work together to extend the schema,forming a more integrated inheritance network with the existing constructions.And the relationship between productivity and inheritance of English it-cleft construction can be concluded through the observation of productivity and its extended inheritance network:productivity contributes to the extension of inheritance of it-cleft construction,and the expansion of inheritance network,in turn,enhances the productivity.In other words,the productivity of it-cleft construction can be considered as the internal representation of the external change of inheritance,inheritance,for another,can be regarded as the external representation of the internal productivity of the construction,and these two factors enrich and base on each other.In addition,coercion plays a significant role in the expansion of it-cleft construction.In the first place,non-nominal constituents can gradually enter into the foci slot via prototypical coercion,desalinating the restriction on noun focus.Secondly,a new construction can be formed through the coercion of frequency,for example,the formation of predicational it-cleft construction.The study reveals that the inheritance network of it-cleft construction can be observed and depicted from the external and internal angles,and its network change is the result of both inheritance and productivity.The research results can offer new research perspective and theoretical references for the diachronic change of constructional network of syntactic constructions and further provide methodology references for the diachronic depiction of the constructional network systems.Besides,the present paper probes into the relationship between productivity and inheritance within the theoretical framework of construction grammar through it-cleft construction,which can review the internal theoretical network of construction grammar and help to enrich and develop the theory.