A Study Of English And Chinese "ADV+N/NP" Structures:Construction Grammar Perspective

"ADV+N/NP"combination, as a corresponding sentence pattern in English and Chinese, is one of the hot issues in language study. And due to its special syntactic features and high frequency of use in both English and Chinese, especially Chinese, this form of language has attracted much attention and concern in linguistic research. However, it is noted that most of the studies about this combination are just about Chinese, and only limited studies analyse the combination in the perspective of construction grammar.The thesis studies "ADV+N/NP"combination in the framework of construction grammar and also furthers to a comparative study between Chinese and English. The paper firstly introduces several types of the combination in Chinese and English. This combination in-English mainly includes "adverb of place+noun/noun phrase"," scope adverb+noun/noun phrase"," degree adverb+noun/noun phrase" and " adverb of time+noun/noun phrase" However, in Chinese, this combination involves " scope adverb+noun/noun phrase"" degree adverb+noun/noun phrase" and " adverb of time+noun/noun phrase". Besides, according to the Goldberg’s Construction Grammar (GCG), the combination is a unit of form and sense, and certain character of its form or sense can not be obtained from any component of this construction or other established construction. The thesis makes the points that the combinations both in Chinese and English are considered as the construction, and analyzes how to understand the sense of the construction. According to the paper, the four "ADV+N/NP"combinations in English are all the extension of "ADJ+N/NP "construction, whose cognitive foundation is grammatical metaphor. However,"degree adverb+noun/noun phrase" in Chinese is the extension of "ADV+ADJ"construction. The cognitive motivation of the extension is cognitive metonymy,"adv" provides the meaning of Degree for the meaning of "ADV+N/NP " and this meaning coerces the prototypical meaning of nouns. To understand the sense of the Noun of the construction needs to understand its metonymical meaning, while the extension of "scope adverb+noun/noun phrase" and " adverb of time+noun/noun phrase " constructions is the verb-object structure, and their cognitive foundation is still the grammatical metaphor.This study on "ADV+N/NP" in construction grammar provides theoretical supports not only for better understanding of specificity and cross linguistic universality of the construction. And it helps the further development of the construction grammar.