A Cognitive Study On English N+N Compounds From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

As one of the most important parts in language acquisition,English N+N compounds have drawn much attention and become one of the focuses of modern linguistic research.The scholars at home and abroad carried out study on N+N compounds from different perspectives,and have made great achievements.However,most of study focus on the word formation and the syntactic and semantic relations of endocentric N+N compounds,few people answered why the whole meaning of N+N compounds is most often quite different from the meaning of its component parts.Construction grammar provides us a novel perspective on morphological study,it rejects the Verb-centered View of traditional grammar,and holds that the formation of grammatical structures is closely related with human cognition,and holds grammatical construction has its own meaning which cannot be deduced from its component parts.Based on construction grammar and cognitive metaphor theory,this study attempts to probe into meaning integration of English exocentric N+N compounds and tries to answer the following questions:1)How does the construction coercion function in the semantic integration of English N+N compounds?2)In what ways does human cognition affect the semantic integration of English N+N compounds?3)What are the distribution characteristics of English N+N compounds lexicon?All data used in this study are collected from Longman Contemporary Advanced English Dictionary（5th edition）and Dictionary of Contemporary English New Words,and this study adopts the qualitative and quantitative methods in data analysis.Through analysis this study finds:Firstly,in the process of semantic integration of exocentric N+N compounds,the metaphor and metonymy are the two common cognitive mechanisms and they are motivated by construction coercion.Furthermore,the number of metaphor-based exocentric compounds is the largest through data analysis and the use of metaphors in exocentric N+N compounds also reflects the economic principles in language use.Secondly,construction grammar has a strong explanation for the cognitive rationale of the exocentric N+N compounds.Based on the contiguous properties of the internal semantic structures of N₁ and N₂,the semantic integration is achieved by coercion.The operations of coercion are largely due to the metaphorical and metonymic mechanism,which offer a reasonable and unified explanation for coercion.This study also finds that in exocentric N+N constructions,the coercion exits in two places.The first is the whole N+N construction’s coercion on the two constituent nouns;the second is the mutual coercion of the two constituent nouns after metaphor or metonymy in the process of semantic integration.Thirdly,the distribution characteristics of N+N constructions in lexicon are hierarchical,and the N+N constructions are highly abstract and with generality.They are located at the top of the hierarchical structure and can be represented by schemas;the next level is semi-schema N+N constructions,in which one part is fixed,and the other is open;the bottom of this hierarchical structure are the specific instantiations of N+N constructions;the distribution characteristics of the N+N constructions in lexicon reflect the general picture of the hierarchical lexicon.