A Cognitive Construction Grammar Approach To English CMCs With Heart And Head As Objects

English caused-motion construction([SUBJ [V OBJ OBL]])refers to an event in which an agent causes an object to move.It is a basic type of argument structure construction including two main types: the expressions with prepositions and the expressions with adverbs,i.e.[SUBJ [V OBJ ADJ]] and [SUBJ [V OBJ ADV]].Since Goldberg's book,Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure was published,English caused-motion construction are more and more concerned by construction grammar scholars at home and abroad.It is a pity that compared to the studies on English caused-motion construction with prepositions,the studies of English caused-motion construction with adverbs are not systematic and comprehensive.This situation has changed in recent years.For example,Zhang & Luo(2014)affirm the identity and position of away(adverb)construction in the inheritance network of English caused-motion construction,pointing out that away(adverb)construction has evolved into the construction which is filled with multiple cross-domain construals with independent productivity.Jackendoff(1997,2002b)and Mateu & Espinal(2007,2010)also research on off/out(adverb)construction and further verify the existence of English caused-motion construction with adverbs.In order to further affirm the status of English caused-motion construction with adverbs,Ma & Zhang(2016)specially explored English caused-motion constructions with adverbs(heart and head as objects).This type of constructions can be abbreviated as English CMCs with heart and head as objects.Its syntactic representation is subject + predicate + one's head/heart + off/out.Their study affirms the existence of this type of constructions,pointing out that as the subordinate constructions of the English caused-motion construction,they could develop into the schematic constructions which obtain additional and special constructional meanings except inheriting the abstract meaning from their superordinate construction.Heart and head are the two most important body organs in the human body.They perform their duties and maintain the life of the human body.Therefore,it is necessary to further excavate the intrinsic features of English caused-motion constructions with heart and head as objects from the perspective of quantitative statistics.This is not only a very important meaning for a comprehensive understanding of the research on English caused-motion construction with adverbs,but also a perfection and supplement to the whole research of English caused-motion construction.Based on the foresaid situation,this thesis devotes to investigating English caused-motion constructions with heart and head as objects within the framework of cognitive construction grammar.The paper adopts the methods of combining the quantitative study and qualitative study together with COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English)as a database,making a systematic and multi-functional analysis of the special language phenomenon and mainly solves the next three questions: 1What are the verbs that may occur in the V slots of English caused-motion constructions with heart and head as objects [SUBJ[V OBJ(heart/head)ADV]]? 2 What are the characteristics of the verbs that occur in the V slots of these constructions? 3 How do verbs and constructions interact on the formation of the meaning of the target constructions?To answer the research questions,we combine collostructional analysis,constructional inheritance,coercion and integration,metaphor and metonymy construal and analogy to build the analysis framework.Based on the COCA statistics,this study adopts R software and Stefanowitsch and Gries' s collostructional analysis to calculate the association strength between the verbs that occur in the V slots and English caused-motion constructions with heart and head as objects via the Fisher-Yates exact test.Then we will classify the verbs according to the verb types that Levin(1993)divided and generalize their characteristics.Next,we try to seek the semantics of the target constructions depending on the corpus examples and finally summarize the formation mechanisms of these constructions.The study results show that:(1)The verb most strongly associated with the Heart construction is eat,followed by rip,sing,pour,tear,cry,play,sob,work,cut.In the Heart construction,there are 58 collexemes in the verb slot in total,all of which show a significant attraction relationship,and none of the collexemes show a repulsion relationship with it.The verb most strongly associated with the Head construction is blow,followed by bite,cut,scream,rip,take,laugh,tear,bark,knock.57 out of 58 show significant attraction relationship,and only one collexemes,that is,see,show repulsion relationship with the Head construction.Besides,52 out of 117 significantly associated collexemes in the target constructions are hapaxes.It is shown that the target constructions are of some productivity and their productivity will enlarge in the future.(2)Although the parent verbs occurring in the target constructions are diversified on the whole,it still prefers certain types of verbs.In terms of Levin(1993),all the verbs that show strong collostructional strength with the target constructions are classified.The result shows that in the heart construction,among the 58 parent verbs,verbs of communication(15%),verbs of emission(14%),split verbs(9%),verbs of removing(7%),verbs of cutting(7%),and verbs of creation and transformation(7%)account for a large proportion.And verbs of ingesting,verbs of social interaction,verbs involving the body as well as verbs of contact by impact seldom occur.What's more,most parent verbs in the group of miscellaneous verbs are hapaxes.While in the head construction,among the 57 parent verbs,verbs of communication(28%),split verbs(16%),verbs of removing(9%),verbs of cutting(7%),and verbs involving the body(7%)account for large proportion.And verbs of emission,verbs of ingesting,verbs of creation and transformation,verbs of contact by impact as well as verbs of social interaction seldom occur.What's more,most parent verbs in the group of miscellaneous verbs are hapaxes.According to the distribution of all the parent verbs,the paper chooses the instances of several types of verbs that account for a large proportion from COCA to make an explanation.It is found out that the typical semantics of the target constructions is subjects cause the objects,heart and head to make spacial displacement.Later more and more verbs appear in the target constructions and the constructional meanings of the heart construction and the head construction become abstract and different after the objects,heart and head,interact and integrate with the different participating verbs and their own constructions.The former is concerned with emotion and the meaning of it become abstract from subjects cause the heart to make special displacement to subjects manage his emotion through dynamic action while the meaning of the latter become abstract from subjects cause the head to make special displacement to subjects pull out all the stops to do or accomplish the action.(3)The formation mechanism of English caused-motion constructions with heart and head as objects is related to human's cognitive way of analogy and metonymical and metaphorical construal.According to the collostructional strength,some types of the verbs which show strong attraction with the target constructions are split verbs,verbs of removing,verbs of cutting.These verbs are compatible with the target constructions.The typical semantics of the constructions is the combining of their components,expressing caused motion which inherits from the superordinate caused-motion construction.The untypical semantics of the constructions are not equal to the combining of their components.Some types of verbs which show strong attraction with the target constructions also include the verbs which cannot express caused motion and most of these verbs mismatch with the objects.The semantic mismatch between the verbs and the objects can only be dispelled through metaphor and metonymy construal during the process of coercion and integration of the superordinate caused-motion construction.Specifically,for novel expressions,speakers constantly choose different verbs to substitute those of the typical caused-motion expressions with the help of metonymical and metaphorical construal when using these typical expressions under the premise of keeping the form and meaning of the construction unchanged.And the target constructions emerged through analogy.This study affirms the existence of English caused-motion construction with adverbs,and discovers the intrinsic nature,formation mechanism,and the motivation of productivity of English caused-motion constructions with heart and head as objects.The results of this study contribute to a comprehensive and profound understanding of English caused-motion constructions with heart and head as objects.This study provides a new perspective for English caused-motion constructions with heart and head as objects and also provides methodological enlightenment for the empirical study of construction grammar.