A Contrastive Study Of The Constructions Of ’Find/Zhao’ Between English And Chinese

As an important linguistic phenomenon, verb-complement construction (VC) hasalways been occupying a place in the study of syntax and semantics. It has become ahot issue and many scholars have discussed it both at home and abroad. The foreignand Chinese scholars, in fact, study it mainly from two dimensions: synchronic anddiachronic studies. However, few of them compare this construction between Englishand Chinese in detail. The construction grammar (CG) certainly provides a betterconstrual for VC constructions in both English and Chinese. Goldberg’s CG Theorythinks that construction i.e. the form-meaning pairing is the basic unit of language andhas its corresponding meaning and pragmatic function to form even if there were nospecific words. With the theory of CG which derived from the background ofCognitive Linguistics, the paper makes a contrast of find/zhao VC with the help ofcorpora. The focus of the paper specifically aims at Verb1-Verb2VC in order to revealthe similarities and differences between English and Chinese. The findings will helplearners master the English or Chinese constructions better.Up to now, many scholars from both home and abroad have approached VCconstruction through different perspectives and come to quite a few conclusions, butfew of them employ the corpus-this persuasive tool to make a contrastive study ofsome specific words. Different from previous studies, the article takes the method of acontrastive research, and combines introspective and empirical studies to investigate "find" and "zhao" VC constructions. The construction study is grounded upon thereal-life linguistic data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)and Peking University’s Corpus of the Chinese Language (CCL), and part of instancesfrom the computer corpus-Baidu and introspection. The specific procedures of studyare as follows. First, search "find" and "zhao" respectively from the correspondingcorpus; next, find and download the configuration structures which meet therequirements; then, sort out and analyze to make a comparison of the two; finally,draw the following main conclusions. Both frequently appear in the verb-objectstructure, and both "find" and "zhao" can be followed with complement. Thecomplement of "find" often appears after the object and the cases which are directly connected to the verb complement are not found, while there are many cases in which"zhao" is directly connected to the verb as a complement, and used in the spokenlanguage with a special usage."Zhao+verb" construction is often with a derogatoryemotion, which is quite distinguished from English. It can be seen that V1V2VC ofEnglish is underdeveloped compared with that of Chinese from the data, while V1V2VC structure in the Chinese vocabulary is very developed, with greater productive useand economic flexibility.The paper makes a contrast of V1V2VC of "find" and "zhao" with CG theoryand sums up similarities and differences so as to enrich previous studies. Therefore,this study has certain theoretical and practical significance. Not only prove theexplanatory power and superiority of the CG theory in the grammatical study to acertain extent, also the findings will bring certain enlightenment to learners andEnglish and Chinese teaching, meantime benefit English-Chinese translation andcross-cultural communication and other aspects of the study. Despite the paper tries toexplain "find" and "zhao" as much as possible, still needs further study to the article.The author suggests that future studies should include more aspects ofverb-complement construction in order to make a more perfect construal.