| “Chi(eat)+ NP” is a productive construction in modern Chinese,in which NP not only refers to food,but also indicates places and tools,such as “shitang(canteen)”“dawan(big bowl)”,etc.Previous researchers have made a detailed study of this construction from syntactic,semantic,cognitive aspects and many other perspectives,and achieved desirable results.However,most of them adopt qualitative analysis to describe and interpret the construction on the basis of specific examples.The semantic generalization is not comprehensive and systematic,and no attention has been paid to the relationship between different constructional meanings.In view of this,based on the BCC corpus,with the help of collostructional analysis,this paper attempts to re-examine the “Chi(eat)+ NP” construction from the perspective of construction grammar by combining qualitative and quantitative methods,aiming to identify collexemes that can fill the NP slot in “Chi(eat)+ NP”construction,and summarize the constructional meanings of “Chi(eat)+ NP”construction and their relations.After a detailed analysis,the following findings are obtained.Firstly,based on the data retrieved from BCC corpus and with the help of collostructional analysis,it is found that 16 types of collexemes could fill the NP slot.They are collexemes denoting manner,organization,instrument,money,system,people,place,meal/grain,weapon/violence,abstract noun,natural phenomena,profession/skill,game,medicine,ingredient,metal and dust.Secondly,according to relationships between the verb and noun phrases,this paper discovers five constructional meanings of “Chi(eat)+ NP”,namely,“eating”“receiving” “relying on” “suffering” and “consuming”.The constructional meaning of“eating” focus on “eating by a certain instrument” and “eating in a certain place”,meanwhile,the constructional meaning of “receiving” can be further analyzed as“getting the feeling of eating something” “relying on” “gaining” “getting the quality of the noun” and “absorbing”.Lastly,as the prototypical meaning of “Chi(eat)+ NP” construction has been discovered to be “putting food into one's mouth,chewing it and swallowing it down”,this paper demonstrates that the constructional meanings of “Chi(eat)+ NP”construction are extended through agent-oriented metaphorical extensions,patient-oriented metaphorical extensions,metaphorical extensions with both agent and patient orientation and metonymic extensions.This study also indicates that all these constructional meanings of “Chi(eat)+ NP” construction are related through polysemy links.Each unconventional constructional meaning is an extension of the prototypical meaning,and inherits more or less the specifications of the central sense with focuses on different facets in the process of eating.Additionally,“Chi(eat)+ NP” construction is motivated by the economy principle and is culturally and socially adaptable. |
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