A Study On The Productivity Of The Way Construction From The Perspective Of Constructional Change

As one of the main forms of English argument construction,the way construction [SUBJi[V[POSSi way]OBL]] mainly describes that the subject referent moves along the route referred by the prepositional clause,which is used to represent the displacement events in space.Since the publication of the book Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure by Goldberg(1995),the research of the way construction has been continuously concerned by construction scholars at home and abroad.The qualitative description of the way construction from Goldberg's(1995)synchronic perspective has been widely acknowledged,including the semantic restriction and irrelevance of accessible verbs and internal integration between verbs and construction.With the emergence of diachronic construction grammar,change within a specific construction like semantics,morphophoneme and collocational restriction,etc.gradually coming into our view.Besides,how to track the route of constructionalization and constructional change from the perspective of constructional change so as to explain the rules of language evolution has become a hot issue in construction grammar.However,the existing diachronic studies about the way construction are not mature enough,the few diachronic researches(Israel,1996)mainly summarize the change in the displacement events in space by listing some examples.Obviously,the qualitative description of the way construction cannot fully reveal the dynamic change within the construction so that in order to fuel the development of diachronic construction grammar,it is necessary to explore the internal motivation of its diachronic development according to the empirical data.The study holds the view that during the process of diachronic change,not only has it undergone semantic changes,but also syntactic changes,resulting in constructional variant.A pilot study has been conducted to verify the hypothesis and it shows that there are semantic change and constructional variant in the diachronic process of the way construction.The constructional variant means that a new form variant “V+one's+adj.+way” came into being in its actual use.Compared with [SUBJi[V[POSSi way]OBL]],an adjective slot appears in this variant which adds users' subjective evaluation to constructional semantics,thus the meaning of this construction is more abundant and the construction is more productive.Productivity is a part of features of constructional change(Bybee et al.,1994).The semantic changes exist in both verbs and adjectives.For explaining these phenomena,from the perspective of constructional change(Hilpert,2013;Traugott & Trousdale,2013)and based on construction grammar in usage-based theory and metonymy in construction grammar,the following three questions are attempted to be answered:(1)Which kinds of adjectives and verbs can enter the way construction?(2)What are the characteristics of verbs and adjectives in semantic change?(3)What are the main reasons for increasing productivity of the way construction?In order to answer the questions above,this study exhaustive collects the way construction in COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English)and COHA(Corpus of Historical American English),and draws the verbal clustering graph by using MDS(multidimensional scaling)then to classify the verbs with time periods in corpus.Based on this,this study probes into the diachronic change of adjectives in the constructional variant “V+one's+adj.+way” by taking collostructional analysis analysis and R software and sums it up from static adjectives and dynamic adjectives.At last,based on the semantic change of verbs and adjectives in the way construction,this study demonstrates how the verbs and adjectives contribute to the rules of constructional productivity.The main research findings are as follows:(1)The data collected from corpus show that fifteen categories of verbs can enter into the way construction,they are verbs denote movement along a path created by the body,movement with a regular route,movement along the path with difficulties,slow motion,swift motion,groping motion,motion with an irregular path,movement along a path created in a special way,movement along a path created by force or barriers removing,movement along a winding road,movement along a path created through deceiving or threatening,movement along a path created by money or strength,verbs indicate the co-occurrence of an action and sound as well as condition,and verbs create a path by eating,drinking,talking,smiling or thinking.There are eight categories accessible adjectives in “V+one's+adj.+way”,they are static adjectives which describe the status of a person or a thing,color,title of science or material,nationality and static adjectives used for emphasizing and dynamic adjectives present mental activities,characters,conducts and action tendency of a person.(2)According to MDS analysis,the semantic change of verbs in the way construction can be clustered into four stages: in 1810-1900,the distinctive collexemes are verbs refer to the motion itself;verbs appeared in 1910-1950 mainly represent the movement which is accompanied with route creation;in 1960-1990,most verbs express the coexistence of motion and events;the distinctive collexemes in 2000-2017 are verbs that create path through individual behaviors.Since the constructional variant “V+one's+adj.+way” came into being,dynamic adjectives including words describe mental activities,characters as well as moralities and movement tendency and static adjectives including the nature of people or things,color,nationality,title of science or material as well as adjectives used to emphasize have entered into the way construction.The results from collostructional analysis show that the frequency of dynamic adjectives increases gradually and adjectives describe movement tendency gradually become distinctive collexeme.(3)In the way construction,one of the main reasons for increasing productivity is that the frequency of verbs and adjectives in verb slot and adjective slot has increased.At first,the increase in the number and using frequency of verbs and adjectives lead to their semantic generalization so that the prototype of semantics of the way construction is categorized.The meaning of verbs in the way construction have extended,its constructional meaning undergoes two kinds of semantic categorization.One is that the displacement is created from a representation of a path in space to the displacement with a path created in time.The other is that constructional meaning is presented from space to time and space then to time.The frequency of accessible adjectives has increased and the extension of adjectives from static adjectives to dynamic adjectives lead to the constructional meaning of the way construction experiences a semantic categorization from the subject referent moves along a static path to the subject referent moves along a dynamic path.On the one hand,the expansion of accessible verbs is based on the prototype extension of constructional semantics,on the other hand,the increase in the token frequencies of verbs and adjectives stimulate the extension of constructional prototype.They complement each other and contribute to the productivity of the way construction.Secondly,metonymic coercion plays an important role in the generation and interpretation of constructional meaning.During the diachronic change of the way construction,the meaning of verbs constantly extends,then the conflicts between constructional semantics and meaning of verbs has occurred.Verbs enter into the way construction through a metonymy mechanism ACTION FOR ACTION MEANS OR MANNER.In the means,manner and possessum interpretation of the way construction,its constructional meaning coerces the lexical meaning in a metonymic way to eliminate the semantic conflicts within the construction so that the way construction is becoming more inclusive and the productivity of the way construction will increase.This study explores how the semantic and syntactic changes within the way construction promote its productivity from the diachronic perspective.The results have a guiding effect in the study of diachronic construction grammar and at the same time,it also has some enlightenment on construction acquisition and teaching.