A Semantic Study On English Determination Construction "a/the +N"

As one of the most common and frequently used constructions in daily communication,English Determination Construction(EDC)usually refers to linguistic expressions whose main semantic meaning is provided by the head noun,not the determiner.The present study mainly focuses on EDC which can be formalized as "Det.+N.",among which Det.refers to the determiners with its grammatical functions represented by a and the,and N.is the abbreviation of the term "noun" with rich semantic contents.In recent years,although English determiners and EDC have been studied by many scholars from home and abroad from various perspectives,the semantic formative process of EDC has not been given a comprehensive attention or illustrationBased on the related theories of Construction Coercion and Lexical Coercion,the present study tries to build up a Bidirectional Coercion Model(BCM)as a theoretical framework with the hope of providing a comprehensive analysis of the constructional meaning of EDC.Due to the fact that there are many determiners in English,the present study only selects a and the to form the "a+N" Construction and "the+N" Construction as research objects to analyze EDC.What's more,the British National Corpus(BNC)would be chosen to provide the authentic data and valid language examples for the further analysis so as to make a more objective and scientific research.Through the data collection and analysis,the major findings are represented as follows:On the one hand,construction coercion allows a construction composed of the determiner and the noun to be a specific EDC and further to integrate and adjust its attributes to accommodate the whole construction with the hope to form more grammatical sentences.On the other hand,lexical coercion leads to the semantic diversity of constructional meaning for EDC since the usage-based lexical items inserted in EDC have its own different meanings.What calls for here is that the BCM in the present study has its coercive effects on the constructional meaning and lexical meaning by bidirectional interaction in the semantic formative process of EDC and thereby the syntactically and semantically acceptable sentences come into being.It is worth pointing out that based on the integration of top-down and bottom-up analysis,BCM would make up for the deficiencies of construction-oriented and lexical-oriented views and the gap made by the scholars on the researches of determiners and EDC to a certain degree.In addition,the present study,based on the application of BCM,realizes the combination of vertical analysis(constructions coerce lexicons,lexicons coerce constructions)and horizontal analysis(constructions coerce constructions,lexicons coerce lexicons)of EDC,the further study can make attempt to analyze more determiners with the BCM so as to extend the research field of EDC.