A Research On The Semantic Features And The Cognitive Motivation Of Chinese Construction “A Lai B Qu”

The construction “A lai B qu” is widely used in practical language.In modern Chinese,it is of great value for research.On the basis of this research background,this paper mainly discusses the following questions:1.What are the syntactic and semantic constraints of A and B in construction “A lai B qu”? 2.What are the construction meanings of “A lai B qu” ? 3.What are the underlying cognitive motivations of construction meaning?Based on Construction Grammar theory and Cognitive Linguistics theory,this paper adopts qualitative research and quantitative research to draw the following conclusions:1.Language unit generated by the construction “A lai B qu” has the same status as words and phrases and it is a complete lexical unit.A and B can be served by nouns,verbs,adjectives and adverbs,and A and B has the same part of speech in one construction.A relationship that between A and B can be synonym,antonym,co-hyponym and combination form.2.The construction meaning of “A lai B qu” includes: 1.The action repetition 2.Duration of time of actions 3.direction of actions.When the construction meaning of“A lai B qu” is the repetition of the action,A and B are acted by the action verbs or nouns,and when the A and B are nouns,the construction meaning is the repetition of the action that the A and B’s metonymy can refer to.A and B are used as nouns stand for body parts or action verbs when the construction meaning is action-continued.When the construction meaning is the direction of actions,the A and B are acted by the verbs refer to displacement.3.Construction meaning of “A lai B qu ” can be explained by Conceptual Metaphor Theory,Conceptual Blending Theory and Construction Coercion.First of all,the cognitive domain — the repetition of concrete action "come and go" are projected to another cognitive domain—repetition of the abstract actions,and then the repetition of the actions represents the increase of the amount of action s,which means that projection is from the quantitative domain to the time domain,that is,the action s last long time.Secondly,from Construction Coercion Theory,the constructional meaning(repetition of action)suppresses the original meaning of nouns A and B,so A and B changed meaning and function to adapt the construction meaning.Lastly,from Conceptual Blending Theory,The Input Space I provides the frame "...lai...qu ",the Input Space II provides the elements of actions,and the frame and the element carries on the preliminary integration.Then the obtained materials are processed and integrated cognitively: the Input Space I provides the behavior mode,the Input Space II provides the behavior action,and the action occurs in a certain way,so the meaning of repetition of actions are produced.Finally,according to the construction context and logic,the construction meaning is extended to the duration of actions.