A Contrastive Study Of "Sòng (送)" And Its Chinese Counterpart"Send" In Perspective Of Construction Grammar

From the linguistics terms,“construction” is an old concept. The traditional grammariansthought that construction can be used to describe language. In the early stage of TG grammar,“construction” is the essential part of grammar research. Then, with the development of TGgrammar, the concept of “construction” was weakened. After a period of marginalization, Adele E.Goldberg’s definition of “construction” makes the construction regain the core status of grammarresearch. In the terms of development, Goldberg’s construction grammar has two theoreticalbackgrounds: first,“construction grammar” is evolved from Fillmore’s Case grammar; second,George Lakoff’s generative semantics or Gestalt grammar solidified the theory of constructiongrammar. From2009, Goldberg’s construction research steps into a new stage. From researchingconstruction meaning to a research tool of cognitive science, Goldberg begins to research the roleof construction in the process of generalization.In this thesis, the contrastive analysis between construction “sòng (送)” and construction“send” is under the frame of Goldberg’s construction grammar. Form and meaning are the mostimportant parts of construction, so the paper starts from the polysemy of “sòng (送)” and “send”,then to analysis their construction features and the relationship between form and meaning. Afterthat, the thesis researches how construction influences meaning from the generalization. Therelationships between construction and meanings testify that the language meaning is fromhuman’s cognition to environment. Moreover, the research also offers some supports to the secondlanguage acquisition and the research of translation theory.Based on the corpus-available, this thesis employs the contrastive analysis, introspectionand empirical method to analyze construction “sòng (送)” and “send”. The research focuses onfollowing items:1) the contrastive analysis between polysemy “send” and polysemy “sòng (送)”;2)the contrastive analysis between the word collocation of “sòng (送)” and “send”;3) the contrastiveanalysis between “sòng (送)” and “send” in the transitive construction, the ditransitive construction,the caused-motion construction and the resultative construction;4) to explore the reason causingthe difference between the meaning scope of “sòng (送)” and “send” by generalization.The thesis comes to the following conclusions through the contrastive analysis:1) themeaning scope of “sòng (送)” is wider than that of “send”;2) the word collocation of “send” isdifferent to that of “sòng (送)”;3)“send” can be applied into the transitive construction, ditransitive construction, caused-motion construction and resultative construction, while “sòng(送)” can be not only applied into the four constructions, but also the “VV” construction;4) thetransitive construction is the base of the construction “send” and “sòng (送)”, and it influences theother three constructions;5) after generalizing the construction of “send” and “sòng (送)”, themeaning of “sòng (送)” has two developing directions, but the meaning of “send” only has one,which is caused by the difference in the meaning of transitive construction. Therefore, in myopinion, the difference of the transitive construction brings about the difference between meaningscope of “send” and meaning scope of “sòng (送)”.