The Study Of English Light Verb Construction:A Bidirectional Coercion Model

As one of the most pervasive construction across languages,Light Verb Construction(LVC)always refers to such kind of linguistic expressions whose main predicative role is provided not by the verb,but by its nominal complement.The present study focuses its research concern on English LVC which can be formalized as "LV+a+DN".Hereinto,"LV",the verb carrying bleaching semantic content,is shorted for the term "light verb";and "DN",the nominal complement denoting nonstative meaning,is abbreviated from the term "deverbal nouns".Up to now,many scholars from both home and abroad have approached English LV and LVC through different perspectives,while there exist more or less some limitations like unidirectionality,one-sidedness and subjectivity in clarifying semantic idiosyncrasies in the formation process of English LVC.The present study,whereupon,tries to build up a Bidirectional Coercion Model(BCM)as its theoretical framework based on related theories of Construction Coercion and Lexical Coercion in Construction Grammar with the hope to provide a more comprehensive and in-depth explanation to the semantic idiosyncrasies around English LVC.Considering that there exist many LVs in English,only two typically antonymous ones,take and give,are chosen in the present study to form TAKE Construction and GIVE Construction for further analysis.Meanwhile,the linguistic examples taken for those two constructions are all grounded upon the data collection from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)so as to make the research more objective and effective.After a thorough data and theoretical analysis,the main findings are as follows:On the one hand,the up-down Construction Coercion ensures the construction in question being conformed to the defining category of LVC,and coerces and integrate slots fillers in LVC to live in harmony with each other to form a grammatical clause or sentence.On the other hand,the bottom-up Lexical Coercion has an influence on what kind of semantic content a specific LVC will express because every semantic elements inserted in LVC has its own meaning.And the usage-based lexical meaning makes semantic diversity of English LVC come into being.It is worth noting that coercive effects grown out of BCM run through the whole process of semantic formation in LVC to eliminate some meaning conflicts between construction and lexicon,thereby ensuring the English LVC semantically and pragmatically acceptable.In fact,BCM can roll up-down analysis and bottom-up analysis into one in dealing with English LVC,which may avoid some absolute views like Construction-domination and Lexicon-domination,and then bridge the research gap made by previous scholars on English LVs and LVC to a large extent.While it is worth pointing out that BCM applied in the present study only focuses on vertical coercion between LVC and its semantic elements,there have been no more horizontal coercion discussed within constructions and lexical components.In this sense,further studies can make attempts to combine vertical coercion and horizontal coercion together,and take more kinds of LVC into their analysis scope so as to deepen and widen the research on English LVC.