A CIS Approach To English Delexical Verb Construction

Delexical verb constructions (DVC for short) pervade the everyday speech ofEnglish speakers, for instance “have a look”,“have a walk”. DVC is of greatsignificance in English and reveals the cognitive mechanism of human being. Inprevious studies, scholars have explored many aspects related to DVC, such as itssyntactic structure, classification, semantics, functions, cognitive foundation, evencomparison in different languages. While, few of the researches are about the dynamicproduction of this construction.The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for the production ofDVC, and a new model is constructed based on inheritance theory, coercion theory andsalience principle. By virtue of this new CIS model,1766items of delexical “have”constructions retrieved from British National Corpus will be studied from both quantityand quality perspectives. That is to say, on one hand, the productive mechanism of DVCwill be revealed, on the other hand, the syntactic, semantic features and pragmaticfunctions of these items will be analyzed.The following three aspects will be demonstrated in the paper:In the first place, the author holds that DVC is a pairing of form and meaning andconsists of a delexical verb and eventive noun.Then, to fill the gap of previous studies, a CIS model is established to explore theproductive mechanism of DVC, which can be illustrated as the following steps. First,with a high degree of salience and prototype effect, two upper constructions, transitiveconstruction and simple verb construction are integrated into a new construction. Butthere is conflict hindering the process of integration, as they are not compatible from theperspectives of syntax and semantics, which is resolved by multiple coercion betweenthem. In the end, the newly integrated construction is acceptable both grammaticallyand semantically. Because of the coercive effect, DVC not only inherits informationfrom the upper constructions but also reveals some features of its own. What’more, the syntactic, semantic features and pragmatic functions of the1766items of English delexical “have” construction retrieved from BNC will be analyzedwithin the CIS model. Syntactically, both transitive and intransitive verbs are acceptablein DVC, and they are mainly monosyllable verbs signifying activity. A delexical verbconstruction can function as predicate, subject, object, adverbial of a sentence or anindependent imperative sentence. In most cases, it presents as predicate and imperativesentence. Semantically, DVC is powerful than a simple verb construction in that itstands for a complete event and highlights the bounded feature. Pragmatically, DVC ismore widely used in informal English. Apart from that, it is superior to simple verbconstruction in that it can keep the balance of the sentence it is in, especially in thesituation where the eventive noun is followed by a clause.