A Study Of The Peripheral Chinese VNN Construction From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

The thesis targets at the Peripheral Chinese VNN Construction by a combination of both quantitative and qualitative research within the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar.In Chinese,the VNN Construction is usually deemed as a regular sentence pattern,and it is found that the previous research concentrates unanimously on the transfer of ownership as a prototypical semantic feature with the VNN Construction,but very few studies pertain to the fact that a change of various abstract patients within the VNN Construction will result in a Peripheral VNN Construction.Hence,considering that the Peripheral Chinese VNN Construction relates to a pairing of form and meaning from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,it is hypothesized that such an idiosyncratic structure will be elucidated by means of a corpus investigation,a questionnaire survey as well as a theoretical analysis.To approach the Peripheral Chinese VNN Construction,three research questions are addressed as follows:1.What is characterized by the Peripheral Chinese VNN Construction in light of form and meaning?2.How do the construction and the components interact with each other within the Peripheral Chinese VNN Construction?3.What is the cognitive mechanism underlying the Peripheral Chinese VNN Construction?The research arrives at the major findings as follows: the Peripheral Chinese VNN Construction is embodied with a constructional meaning transfer that can be categorized into two subtypes of which one takes an abstract patient that is marked by a quantifier to indicate a specific event concerning transfer and of which the other contains an abstract patient without any quantifier so that the whole construction tends to be viewed as an act of transfer.Second,it is revealed that there is an interplay between the construction and the components in it.On the one hand,the construction itself can coerce the components into evoking the constructional meaning transfer.The components,on the other hand,also exert their synergistic influences onto the construction,thus generating additional meanings for the construction per se.The rearrangement or interpretation of the NP components within the construction is an act with intention,namely an act with subjectivity.Third,in virtue of the cognitive device either by metaphor or metonymy,different types of the Chinese VNN Construction are shown to be associated with a family of distinctive but related senses.Accordingly,various patients within the Chinese VNN Construction tend to be a continuum via an inheritance link.To conclude,it claims that the research is of some implications and helps for the related research in linguistics & applied linguistics as well as translation studies.First,it is likely to rely on the theory of Construction Grammar to expound various so-called idiosyncratic constructions.The outcomes of the study are also helpful for language acquisition research which lends some support to facilitating traditional teaching methods by considering the corresponding grammar construction as a target in language acquisition.Second,the achievements arrived at the research are valuable to translation studies.In the process of Chinese-English translation,it will never be exaggerated that various Chinese constructions will be ideal cases to illustrate how either faithfulness or expressiveness must be adhered to.