A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Periphrastic Causative Construction

As an important branch of cognitive linguistics, Construction Grammar has undergone considerable development during the recent years. The leading researcher. Goldberg defines construction as a pairing of meaning and form. By analyzing the typical constructions, Goldberg creatively applies "constructional meaning" into the analysis of argument structures. She advocates the Argument Structure Construction theory, which argues that the meaning of a construction is influenced by the inner semantic constraints of the argument structure. Causation is pervasive in all human languages. Typical Periphrastic Causative Constructions (PCCs) introduced by "make/have/get/cause" in English,"shilrang/jiao/ling" in Chinese has aroused linguists’intensive interest.This paper conducts a contrastive study of English and Chinese PCCs under the framework of Constructional Grammar with data collected from Frown Corpus and The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC), focusing on the investigation of English "make/have" constructions and Chinese "shi/rang" constructions in attempt to provide some implications for second language teaching and translation studies.Specifically, the present study aims at investigating the following questions:1. What is the overall frequency of English and Chinese periphrastic causative constructions in Frown Corpus and LCMC respectively and what can be revealed from the discrepancies?2. Do periphrastic causative constructions have certain semantic constraints on causer, causee, and effect arguments respectively, namely what constituents can appear in the causer, causee and effect slots?3. In terms of the semantic categories that effect slots fall into, do English and Chinese PCCs have some similarities and differences in constructional meaning?Through analysis of the data retrieved from the two corpora, this paper provides the major findings as follows:1. The overall constructional frequency of Chinese PCCs (shi/rang/ling/jiao) is much higher than that of English (make/have/get/cause), indicating that Chinese Periphrastic Causative Verbs have undergone more obvious grammaticalization process than English ones, under which their concrete lexical meanings have been much lost and evolved into causative meaning. Moreover, PCCs with high frequency are "make/have" constructions and "shi/rang" constructions.2. PCCs have specific semantic constraints on the causer, causee and effect arguments:for the causer. English have constructions prefer human, while make constructions prefer objects and both constructions show little tendency for event; in contrast, the causers of Chinese " shi/rang" constructions, for most part refer to the event, with a small proportion of human. As a whole, the percentage of human causers of English PCCs is much higher than that of Chinese ones. Moreover, the causer of Chinese PCCs displays more obvious intention with such structure "为了,以便". For the causee, Chinese PCCs have strict semantic constraints, namely causees have to be human (shi:84.9%; rang:93.7%); while for English PCCs, objects acting as causee is much more common. Finally, for the effect, English PCCs have no obvious constraints, whereas Chinese VPs should indicate the result of change, which explains why only predicative constituents occupy the VP slots while nouns, prepositional phrases and some qualitative adjectives cannot appear in VP slots.3. The constructional meanings of English and Chinese PCCs fall into three categories:cause-emotional reactions, cause-change, cause-action&behavior, of which English PCCs mainly denote "cause-action&behavior"; while Chinese PCCs convey "cause-change" and "cause-emotional reactions". Moreover, they also exhibit difference in each category:for the first class, English PCCs express "arouse general feeling", while Chinese PCCs express more specific emotions; for the second class, the central meaning of English and Chinese PCCs is "cause to become/turn into or present certain state", however, Chinese PCCs also convey the meaning "cause to increase/decrease, cause to suffer" etc; for the last class, the central meaning of both English and Chinese PCCs is "Cause-performative action", however, the proportion of "cause-perception" of Chinese PCCs is much higher than that in English, while the percentage of "Cause-physiological reaction" is much lower than that in English and have construction demonstrates no such constructional meaning.Despite the above-mentioned insightful findings, some deficiencies of the thesis need to be reconsidered, the major one being that the corpora adopted are written texts in the1990s, which fails to present the state of oral language and the written language in the later20years. Furthermore, due to the relatively low frequency of "cause/get" constructions and "Jiao/ling" constructions, this thesis focuses on the exploration of most high-frequency "make/have" and "shi/rang" constructions instead of all typical PCCs, thus the findings may not be fully applied.