Semantic Orientation Of Resultative Construction In Modern Chinese: A Cognitive Semantic Perspective

On the basis of summarizing and commenting upon the major studies of semantic orientation of resultative construction in modern Chinese, the paper claims it is insufficient to study semantic orientation of resultative construction only from the literal or formal logic point of view, but rather, researchers should take into account some subjective factors on the part of language users; then, the paper introduces Talmy's cognitive semantic approach to resultative construction; based on his theoretical framework, the present paper further investigates the internal causes of the diversity of semantic orientation of satellites in Chinese,supported with the data analysis; and finally, this paper concludes that it is the semantic and syntactic properties of the verb root that make these diversified semantic orientation possible, and their actual representation is finalized by the language user via different satellites. It is worth mentioning that this framework offers a new approach to this traditional but interesting topic and may open more channels for further research.