Collostructional Analysis On Periphrastic Causative Construction In Modern Chinese

As one sub-category of Causation Construction,modern Chinese periphrastic causative construction is unique in that it is composed of two predicates,which compose two events respectively.Therefore,the basic form of the periphrastic causative construction is [X+V-cause+Y+V-effect].Among them,[X+V-cause+Y] is the causative event and [Y+V-effect] is the result event.Semantically,[X] is the agent of the action(Causer),[Y] is the affected object(Causee),and the resulting verb is the action that [Y] performs after being affected.The most typical causative verbs are Shi,Jiao,Ling,and Rang,etc.,which have been grammaticalized into causative markers.While,some other verbs appear in the construction [X+V-cause+Y+V-effect],and also produce causative meanings,such as Bi,Quan and Re,etc.Generally,the former causative verbs are named pure causative verbs,which have been taken as the causative markers;and the latter one is called comprehensive causative verbs,which have their own lexical meaning and causative meaning.Although many studies have been devoted to periphrastic causative constructions in Chinese,some questions have been left untouched.This study,adopting a corpus-based approach and applying the Collostructional Analysis,aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the particular set of lexemes preferred by the [V-effect] slot in the periphrastic causative constructions?(2)What are the general semantic features of these verbs(coll.strength>3,with P<0.001)in [V-effect] slot in the periphrastic causative constructions by applying simple collexeme analysis?(3)What are the semantic differences and similarities of the verbs in [V-effect]slot in pure and comprehensive periphrastic causative constructions by adopting multiple distinctive collexeme analysis?After the analysis,major findings of this paper are as follows:Firstly,in “Ling” and “Jiao”,the two pure periphrastic causative constructions,“Ling” construction in particular,shows much stronger preference to V.Psych than other semantic classes of verbs.Next is the V.Intel and the frequency of occurrence is next to V.Psych.Secondly,through a large number of real corpus research,we find that “a change of psychological and mental state of the subject” event is the most frequent one in the effect event of the pure periphrastic causative construction.Therefore,we come to the conclusion that the construction meaning of pure periphrastic causative construction focuses more on conveying the meaning of ‘causing a change of psychological and mental state'.Furthermore,in language use,the construction meaning is closely related with its filler lexemes meaning,and they are in a co-selection relationship.That is to say,what kind of semantic classes verbs in [V-effect] slot of pure periphrastic causative construction will definitely affect the construction meaning.Therefore,the typical construction meaning of pure periphrastic causative construction should firstly express the meaning of “X causes the change of psychological and mental state of Y subjectively”,rather than “X causes Y to perform an action”.However,as for the construction meaning of comprehensive periphrastic causative construction,in a large part,it depends on the lexical meaning of the former causative verb.That is,verbs can filled in the effect slot of comprehensive periphrastic causative constructions are with little limitations,which means verbs that can appear in [V-effect] slot are relatively free and rich in varieties.Finally,through the distinctive collexeme analysis of these two groups of comparison,in terms of semantic features,we can find that the distribution of semantic features is similar to the previous simple collexeme analysis.In the two groups of comparison between pure and comprehensive periphrastic causative analysis,most of these co-occurred effect verbs show stronger attraction to the comprehensive periphrastic causative construction,while only a few of the effect verbs show stronger attraction to the pure periphrastic causative construction,which means that collexemesin pure periphrastic causative construction appear to be more strongly associated with the causative construction,but less distinctive of it,than the collexemes in comprehensive periphrastic causative constructions.