Cognitive Construction Grammar Approach To Implicit Causative Construction

"Subject+verb+object"(SVO) is a frequently used form of Chinese sentence patterns. When different argument roles are played by the semantic components, they would produce homonymous constructions. The constructions in the form of SVO are represented by a monotransitive construction sentence with agent subject, e.g.“老王(医生)做手术”,as compared with one with patient subject’‘老王(病人)做手术”.The two construction sentences present different argument roles and construction meanings despite the same syntactic form, thus illustrating homonymous constructions.This thesis focuses on discussing the latter construction. From the perspective of Cognitive Construction Grammar, we find the construction takes the form of SVO with the causative relation implied. Therefore, such a construction is called Implicit Causative Construction (ICC, for short), as compared with Monotransitive Construction with Agent Subject(MCAS, for short). ICC is similar to common causative constructions from the perspective of conceptual semantics, but they employ a distinctive syntactic form to express the causative relation. ICC can be described as:subject/causer+predicate/action+object/patient. As is known, a causative construction represents a causing event and a caused event. In ICC, the causative relation does exist, so the construction is connected with a causing event and a caused event. Therefore, it can be conceptually explicated as:[E causative A+Vv+B+[E agentive B+[V+C]]], the constructional meaning of which is’the causer causes the agent to do something for him’. The verbal phrase in ICC represents what cannot be achieved by the causer because the performance of such an event requires certain skills or authority; these verbal phrases can be classified according to their distribution in varied fields of our daily life; the argument roles of the object in the verbal phrases are various. All these features contribute to proving the independent status of ICC as the form-meaning pairing. Based on the integration of haplology, the formation of ICC is ascribed to the mechanism of metonymy. Additionally, the intralingual and interlingual comparisons are made in this thesis. One finding of the intrallingual comparison is:ICC and MCAS of the same verbal phrase are "homonymous constructions". The research on the distribution of ICC and the corresponding MCAS sentences shows that the frequency of ICC and the corresponding MCAS sentences is not steady; in general, as to over half of the verbal phrases, the number of the causer subject surpasses the corresponding agent subject. The comparison of ICC and Mnotransitive Construction with Agent Object (shorted as MCAO, e.g.“我烤火”)suggests that, although they both contain the causative relation, the former is ’the subject causes the force from the verbal phrase’and the latter is ’the subject causes the force from the object’. The same phenomenon has been found in English, but the strategies to handle this construction in Chinese and English are not the same. Chinese usually makes use of ICC to represent such actions, while English adopts different approaches, which proves the essential disparity of them. In addition, probes further into ICC’s enabling conditions and pragmatic motivations suggest the prominence of causer in ICC, which can be accounted by the economy principle of language.This thesis is different from previous research in that it draws an independent form-meaning pairing (i.e. ICC) out of separate sentences. It differs from the previous view that the subject in this construction refers to an indirect agent. Apart from that, combined with the top-down approach, it further explores pragmatic motivations and enabling conditions to enlarge the research into this frequent construction in Chinese. Finally, we make the intralingual and interlingual comparison study to discover more features of ICC, which will shed light on Chinese-English translation and Chinese teaching to foreigners.