The Formative Mechanism Of The Non-prototypical Members In The Category Of The Construction “mei X Mei Y”

Construction Grammar has developed gradually in recent years and become a new way of researching languages.Construction Grammarian believe that a construction is a form-meaning pair,and Goldberg states that every form-meaning pair form is a construction,from morpheme to sentence pattern.Dividing a language into constructions can improve the flexibility and precision of researches on the language,and provide foreign language teaching with convenience.“mei X mei Y” is an often used construction in people’s life,so a lot of researchers are interested in it.Most of the previous researches on this construction put their focus on the form,semantic meaning,syntactic and pragmatic usage of the construction,only few researches are about the inner mechanism of the process of this construction.Besides,all the previous scholars think that only four-character phrases can be counted as the members of the category of the construction “mei X mei Y”,but this thesis believes that those five-character and six-character phrases are also members in this category.This does not mean that this thesis is denying the previous scholars,it just means that we have different definitions about the constructional components “X” and “Y”.There are mainly two kinds of theories of categorization,namely the classic theory of categorization and the theory of prototype categorization.Some of the characteristics of the the classic categorization are that the members in a category have equal status;the boundary of a category is clear;a candidate is either the member of the category or it’s not a member in it;and the sufficient and necessaryconditions of a category should be met if a candidate wants to get into it.To the opposite,the members in a prototype category are unequal in their status;the boundary of a prototype category is fuzzy;and members are connected by the family resemblance.Although there is huge difference between the two theories,it doesn’t mean that these two are incompatible.Both of the these two theories are the ways to undersatnd the world.They are complementary and supplementary to each other,every cognitive activities requires the cooperation between the two.This thesis takes the construction “mei X mei Y” as a prototype category and aims at investigating the following three questions:(1)What features do the abstract prototype of the construction “mei X mei Y” have?(2)Do the entity prototypes of the construction “mei X mei Y” bear all the features of the abstract prototype? If not,why?(3)What is the generative mechanism of those non-prototypical member of the category “mei X mei Y”?To investigate the three questions above,we conduct the model search in CCL(Center of Chinese Linguistics PKU)to search for language materials about the construction “mei X mei Y”.After we sort out these language materials,we analyze them and get a series data.The abstract prototype of a category has to be highly productive and has high frequency of use.According to these two points with the help of the data we get,we abstract seven features of the abstract prototype of the category of the construction “mei X mei Y”,they are as following:(1)“X” and “Y” are both monosyllabic words;(2)“X” and “Y” are both nouns;(3)“X” and “Y” are related in meaning;(4)“X” and “Y” are symmetrical in form(they have same amount of characters and are of the same word class);(5)Express the meaning of “have neitherX nor Y”;(6)Express negative meaning;(7)Function as adverbial in sentences.Through the analysis of some members of the category,we find that the entity prototypes do not possess all the features of the abstract prototype,they just possess most of the features and have high frequency of use.We deduce the positions of the example we use in the thesis in the category and make some model graphs.In Graph 1,we connect all the members with the same status in the category with curves,the result of which is that Graph 1 looks like a geographical contour map,so we borrow this concept and name Graph 1 a prototype category contour map.Besides,with the help of the concepts of family resemblance,radial mode and chain mode,we link the members in the category in the longitudinal direction and get Graph 2.And we overlap Graph 1 and Graph 2 and get Graph 3.From Graph 3,we can conclude that the relation between the members in the category of the construction “mei X mei Y” is not as simple as a radial mode or a chain mode,but complicated as a net.And last,we use the theory of construction coercion to analyze the mechanism of the generation of the non-prototypical members in the category of the construction“mei X mei Y”.we find that even in the prototypes of the category,there exists the phenomenon of coercion,which is also the explanation of the fact that the some entity prototypes do not possess all the features of their abstract prototype.Most of the members in the category of the construction “mei X mei Y” reflect the phenomenon of coercion,and except for the three types of coercion put forward by previous scholars,which are construction coercion,lexical coercion and interactive coercion,we find another kind of coercion in the category of the construction “mei X mei Y”,that is construction to construction coercion.