A Usage-based Study On English Verbal Pseudo-coordination Construction

English verbal pseudo-coordination refers that two verbs are linked by the coordinator and but expresses a whole single event,which is different from the ordinary coordination in that two verbs in the former are not simply listing two separated actions.For example,go and get,a pseudo-coordination structure,can be roughly understood as go to get.Verbal pseudo-coordination is prevalent in our daily speech and is closely associated with our life.Due to the resemblance to the ordinary coordination on the surface,it's special form and meaning features are always underestimated in the academic world.Studies on pseudo-coordination that have been made at abroad pay more attention to the syntactic rules of it in form,while domestic studies on it develop slowly and still concentrate on discussing the semantic features from the perspective of traditional grammar,both of which fail to combine form aspect with meaning aspect.Nevertheless,usage-based construction grammar stresses the interaction between form and meaning of a construction.Apart from form and meaning features,a construction is also manifested by the properties of schematicity,productivity and compositionality.Illuminated by a usage-based theory,this research assumes that verbal pseudo-coordination meets the condition as a construction,which can be marked as V1 and V2 construction.The three properties of this construction are measured by the use of verb combinations in the two slots,and the relations between verb slots govern the verbs' use.Therefore,to better comprehend the construction's properties,the usage of verbs and relations between them are the most fundamental part.To verify the assumptions above,this study selects COCA(American Contemporary English Corpus)as the source of data and applies the Covarying Colexeme Analysis to calculate the collostruction strength between the two slots in R environment.Covarying Collexeme Analysis is one of Collostruction Analysis methods that are established by Stefanowitsch and Gries(2003).In this way,the research will investigate the relations between two slots and underlying mechanisms whereby the usage properties of the targeted construction can be grasped more deeply.Specifically,the following questions are to be addressed.1)What properties does verbal pseudo-coordination possess as a construction?2)What kind of verbs can occur in slot V1 and slot V2?3)How are the two verb slots related and what are the cognitive mechanismsgoverning them?The three questions are inter-related.To address them,all patterns of V1 and V2 are searched in COCA.To filter the combinations that are qualified,a set of criteria is established,while in the process contexts are also judged.In this way,a corpus of verbal pseudo-coordination construction is built for this research.Next,an initial conclusion of the sorting is made according to the verbs with high frequency.Then,in line with the algorithm rules of Covarying Collexeme Analysis,the study edits the text of the pairs to be calculated,followed by the operation by instruction in R software,thus a table of collostruction strength is obtained.Finally,on the basis of the quantitative results,a qualitative analysis is further employed to explore the construction.The findings are as follows.The findings are as follows.First,verbal pseudo-coordination meets the conditions of a construction and is a paring of form and meaning.The dissertation makes a comprehensive discussion of the targeted construction's syntactic features and phonological features on the form side and semantic features and pragmatic features on the meaning side,and also finds out the interaction between them.Besides,the construction possesses the characteristics of productivity,compositionality and schematicity.Second,through counting the 1117 pairs of verbs in verbal pseudo-coordination,it is proved that there are less diverse verbs in V1 than V2 and the use of V1 is more limited.Most V1 s are used as intransitive in the construction,among which try appears the most and other verbs are mainly involved with movement,postures,change of state and minimal motion of body.By means of collostructional analysis in R,the most significant combinations in the targeted construction are yielded,which contain learn and adapt,stay and play,bend and pick,go and blow,go and investigate,try and calm and so forth.According to Levin's(1993)classification for English verbs,this dissertation firstly divides verbal pseudo-coordination into the following types,V(motion)and V2,V(communication/social interaction)and V2,V(learn)and V2,V(try)and V2,V(existence)and V2.Verbs of V2 enjoy more freedom but are mostly involved with no change in place,such as get,stare,cry,play and so forth.Third,the classification demonstrates that,virtually,there are sematic coherence and semantic integration between two verb slots,which play the role of deciding the preferable collocates of different types of V1 s.Combined with the mechanism of conceptual metaphor,together,they contribute to the degree of schematicity,productivity and compositionality of verbal pseudo-coordination construction.The semantic coherence in this construction is a result of frame knowledge.The frame which verbs belong to leads to the various collocates of them and the frame of different events results in the irreversible order of two slots.In addition,due to the profile-base organization,semantic integration in different patterns is shaped in the process of V1 and V2's integrating into the targeted construction.And this dissertation discovers six types in total.What's more,conceptual metaphor,another factor,also contributes to the high degree of productivity and schematicity of the V1 and V2 pseudo-coordination construction.In the construction,due to conceptual metaphor,some V1 s are losing their content meaning,which is an indicator of grammaticalization.Therefore,more kinds of V2 s can be attracted,causing a mismatch between form and meaning and influencing the feature of compositionality at the same time.In this study,the corpus with real language instances is used as the source of data collection.A combination of a quantitative approach with a qualitative analysis is employed to make a deep exploration of the verbal pseudo-coordination construction.The semantic coherence based on frame,the semantic integration based on profile-base organization,and conceptual metaphor mechanism work together to affect the properties of the targeted construction.This research provides an empirical model for the studies under usage-based construction grammar and a new perspective for the research of pseudo-coordination construction.Besides,covarying collexeme analysis,a new scientific method,is further practiced and examined in this study.In addition,through exploring the features and cognitive mechanisms,the comprehension of the verbal pseudo-coordination construction will be enhanced,thus an inspiration will be provided for teaching and translation of the construction.