Constructional Study Of [A Le (?) NP] Construction In Mandarin Chinese

[A le???NP]construction is a specific adjective-object _NPP construction which is built from an adjective,the dynamic auxiliary le???,and a noun phrase?Wang,1995?.Adjective-object _NPP construction in modern Chinese is an atypical syntactic structure,which has always attracted widespread attention from linguists?Lv,1966;Zhu,1982;Lu,2005,etc.?.However,verb-object construction is commonly used in daily life and being predicate or predicate-head is one of grammatical features of a verb,denoting meanings of action,behavior,psychological activity,existence,change,appearance and disappearance?Huang&Liao,2002?.Despite the fact,it has been found in everyday communication that adjectives emerge in the position where verbs are and a noun phrase followed.Instead,it signals adjective-object_NPP relationship rather than that of attributive-entity.Two examples are referred to below:?1???????????????????????Xi?oxuép?biàn le m?i y?gèpi?npìde xi?ngc?nPrimary schools common every remote village‘Primary schools are common in every remote village.'?2?????????????????????Zhèjiàn shìx?ngfènle quán c?n de qióngrénThis incident excite the poor in the village‘This incident excited the poor in the village.'Goldberg?1995,p.4?claims that C is a form-meaning pair and from C's components or other formerly established constructions,some aspects of C are not strictly predictable.Afterwards she develops the definition and states that any linguistic pattern is identified as a construction if some aspects its form or function can not strictly predicted by its components or other constructions that are recognized to exist.?Goldberg,2006,p.6?In the past two or three decades,the Construction Grammar has provided a new perspective for grammar research,which draws increasing number of scholars'attention.However,domestic researches in this area are still far and few between.?Zhang&Xu,2011?Considering Construction Grammar as the theoretical framework,the paper deals with[A le???NP]construction by combing previous studies on adjective-object NP construction from perspectives of syntax,semantics,pragmatics,and constructions respectively.Specifically,the research questions in this paper include:1)What are the constructional meanings of[A le???NP]construction?2)What kind of adjectives and noun phrases can enter the construction or what restrictions of adjectives and noun phrases are in[A le???NP]construction?3)What are the motivations of the emergence of the[A le???NP]construction?In answer to the above questions,this paper adopts approaches of qualitative analysis,description and interpretation,and synchronic and diachronic to describe and reveal the nature,state,and characteristics of language.The corpus data employed in the paper are collected from corpus by Institute of Language Intelligence of Beijing Language and Culture University Corpus Center?BCC?and corpus of Peking University Chinese Linguistic Research Center?CCL?.To ensure the accuracy of the part-of-speech of engine items,the author resorts to a modern Chinese dictionary?seventh edition?to proofread in addition to the automatic part-of-speech tagging of corpus online.Through careful observation of collected examples,we find:1)The constructional meaning of[A le???NP]construction,inheritance from adjective-object_NPP construction mainly concerns causal meaning and resultative meaning.Causal meaning means a certain controllable automatic behavior causes NP to undergo some changes and NP has traits indicated by A and resultative meaning indicates uncontrollable factors lead to changes of NP;2)The semantic features of adjectives in[A le???NP]construction are[+GRADABILITY]and[+DYNAMICITYD]and NP slot can be bare noun,compound noun,determiner-noun,quantity,quantity-noun;3)Summary scanning takes effect instead of sequential scanning in construal of[A le???NP]construction.Besides the economic principle of language and novelty are responsible for the emergence of[A le???NP]construction.It must be noted that there are some preliminary and immature views in the paper and whether they are correct or not,it needs to be confirmed by future research.[A le???NP]construction in modern Chinese is a mismatch yet widely used.The thesis to a certain degree is of great significance for language teaching,especially for teaching Chinese as a foreign language.