The Lexical Status Of V-ing Forms In Contemporary English

In traditional grammar, V-ing forms are defined as the inflectional forms of verbs without any lexical status. They have attracted much attention from scholars due to their perplexing grammatical functions. However, most of the previous studies are only the static descriptions of V-ing forms on the syntactic level. Most scholars ignored the dynamic change happened to V-ing forms on the lexical level, that is some V-ing forms are no longer only the inflectional forms of verbs, they are recognized by dictionaries as headwords and have their own entries in dictionaries. The entry of some V-ing forms in dictionaries cannot be explained by the Generative Linguistics, in which linguistic representations are viewed as fixed entities. The author believes that Usage-based Theory and corpus-based studies can explain the treatment of V-ing forms in dictionaries.This thesis presents the empirical study we carried out on the basis of the analysis of V-ing forms in two dictionaries and Word Frequency List of American English under the guidance of Usage-based Theory. The focus of this study is the dynamic change of V-ing forms on the lexical level. By statistic analysis and case studies, this study combined the methodology of quantitative study and qualitative study, analyzed the effect of language use on language system, including the role of frequency in affecting the headword status of some V-ing forms and the role of usage patterns in affecting the POS labeling of some V-ing forms. It is found that frequency plays an indispensable role in affecting the headword status of V-ing forms, and different dictionaries show less disparities on the entry of those V-ing forms with higher frequency while show more disparities on the entry of those V-ing forms with lower frequency; as for the POS labeling of V-ing forms, dictionaries show some disparities on the POS labeling of some V-ing, especially those V-ing forms which are regarded as the peripheral members of different grammatical categories, and these disparities which are caused by the inadequate pure semantic standard to POS identification can be solved by analyzing the usage patterns of those V-ing forms, thus, dictionary makers can make more desirable decisions on the POS labeling of some V-ing forms.This study will provide empirical evidence to defend Usage-based Theory from the theoretical perspective. From the practical perspective, it will provide guidance for dictionary makers to deal with V-ing forms and other perplexing linguistic items in a more desirable way.