| As a a typical linguistic unit,the Chinese "Chi+O" structure has received much attention from many linguists.In this structure,the Chinese verb “ ?”(eat)can be followed by different kinds of objects,including nouns,pronouns,adjectives and even other verbs.However,the previous discussion over this kind of phenomenon have not come to a consensus conclusion,especially in the aspect of the semantic meaning of the collocation and the explanation for the seemingly unconventional collocations.In addition,most of the previous studies make an introspective approach to their study of "Chi+O" and the results of these studies are lack in the support of persuasive data evidence.In recent decades,the development of the construction grammar provides a new perspective for the investigation of this collocation.This study is based on the theory of Construction Grammar,which takes not only the syntactic but also the semantic aspects of the collocation into consideration.Besides,this study adopts the collostructional analysis as the study method to compensate for the shortage of the previous study in their data evidence.As a result,this study is meaningful and significant in both the theory and methodology.This study aims at exploring the following three questions :Firstly,what kind of lexemes can appear as objects in the construction of "Chi+O" and how about their respective collostructional strength with the target construction? What is the prototypical meaning of the target construction based on the analysis of the collostructional strength of all lexemes?Secondly,how does the verb “Chi” fuse with the "Chi+O" construction? What are the other semantic meanings of the "Chi+O" construction and how do the other semantic meanings and the prototypical meaning construct the semantic network of the target construction?Thirdly,what is the cognitive mechanism and the motivation of the "Chi+O" construction?The data of this study is collected from the Contemporary Chinese Corpus of theState Language Commission through keyword search and the manual selection is adopted to guarantee the accuracy of the data.Then all the data are put into the R of the collostructional analysis to calculate the collocational strength of each collexeme of the construction.The findings of the research are as follows:Firstly,among all the lexemes of "Chi+O",those related to concrete food take up80% while the others only count for 20%,from which we draw the conclusion that the prototypical meaning of the construction of "Chi+O" is “putting food into mouth,chewing it and swallowing it”.This result is in accordance with the opinions of most linguists,such as Xiong(2009),Huang(2015).Secondly,the study finds the verb “?”fuses with the "Chi+O" construction through four approaches,namely the elaborations,force-dynamic relation,preconditions and co-occurring activity.This point has been long neglected by many linguists in their studies of "Chi+O" structure.In addition,the further classification of the lexemes except the prototypical ones reveals the other five sub-typical semantic meanings of the target construction as respectively “relying or depending on”,“annihilating”,“accepting”,“suffering and enduring” and “enjoying”.The study also sets up a semantic network of the target construction through the polysemous links of the inheritance relation.Thirdly,this part of the study goes to the exploration of the cognitive mechanism and motivation of the construction and finds that the existence of the "Chi+O" construction is the co-work of the Chinese verb “?”,the argument co-occurrence phenomenon and the cultural background of the language.To sum up,this study is based on a large corpus and adopts the collostructional analysis as research method,which compensates for the shortage of data evidence of the previous studies.Besides,the theoretical framework of the study also provides a more comprehensive explanation for this language phenomenon.Both the two points demonstrate the methodological and the theoretical significance of the study. |
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