A Corpus-based Study On Collostruction Of English Resultative Construction

English Resultative Construction is a basic type of argument structure construction,and it is also a common language phenomenon.The Resultative Construction is composed of a verb and its resultative complement,which is syntactically expressed as [SUB V(OBJ)XP] and semantically means “X causes Y to become Z”.Relevant research is carried out from the perspectives of event structure,pragmatics,syntax,etc.,comparing English and Chinese resultative complements and analyzing adjective result complements.However,these studies do not specifically analyze and classify the verbs in the resultative construction with the specific resultative complements.Meanwhile,there are few studies on the collostruction through corpus quantification.Based on this,the author analyzes the interaction between verbs in the verb slot in the target construction and the construction.This study adopts the COCA corpus as the data source,and takes the English resultative construction with open as adjective complement as the research object by means of R software and Fisher's exact test.And the combination of quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis is applied.The research questions include: 1)Which verbs have strong collostruction strength with the Subj+V+Obj+Open construction? 2)What are the distribution characteristics of the verbs in the target construction? 3)What are the semantic features of the target construction?The research steps include: this paper firstly semi-automatically retrieves the target construction based on the wildcard expressions,and manually identifies the verb and target construction.Secondly,using R software,collostrutional analysis and statistical analysis of the target construction and verbs are performed to calculate the matching collostruction strength between verbs and target construction.Thirdly,according to Levin's classification of verbs,the thesis classifies the verbs occurring in the target construction and analyzes the semantic features of the verbs.The research results show that: 1)Leave has the strongest collostruction strength with the target construction,followed by swing,wrench and other words have strong collostruction strength with the construction;2)The distribution of verbs in this construction is not balanced;3)By analyzing the semantic features of verbs,they can be divided into eight sub-categories,which are verb of change of state,verb of throwing,verb of motion,verbs of sending and carrying,verbs of exerting force,verbs of contact by impact,verbs of removing,and verbs of cutting.The semantic features of this construction are closely related to the semantic orientation of its verbs and result complements,whose meaning is polysemic.In the present study,the corpus quantification method is used to study English resultative construction,which can enrich the research paradigm of construction,which also provides inspiration for foreign language learners to learn the construction and its collocation.