A Collostructional Analysis Of English Verb-particle Constructions-A Case Study Of "V+Off" Construction

Verb-particle constructions,consisting of a verb and a particle in form,are prevalent in English.Due to their productiveness,polysemy and complexity,verb-particle constructions are recognized as a hard nut to crack in English vocabulary acquisition.Hence,English verbparticle constructions have long attracted the attention of researchers at home and abroad.With an overview of previous studies,despite huge volumes of achievements,there still exist some deficiencies.First,most of the studies adopt syntactic,semantic and cognitive approaches to the verb-particle constructions by means of introspective or pure qualitative methods.Second,most scholars focus more on the syntactic and semantic features of particles,whereas they fail to give due attention to the classification and features of verbs as well as the interaction between verbs and the target construction.Also,previous studies are in the absence of a holistic consideration of the construction.Last,the particle off is frequently used.Nevertheless,“V+Off” construction,as a sub-type of verb-particle constructions,has not received wide concern compared with other sub-types.Also,its semantic network and cognitive motivation remain unclear.With the effective combination of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics,collostructional analysis,a probabilistic statistical approach based on Construction Grammar,has come into being and has been more and more widely used.The research method is designed to explore the meanings of constructions by means of comparing the collostructional strength between lexemes in the particular slot and constructions.Collostructional analysis provides authentic and objective data through abundant natural corpora,which compensates for the shortcomings of introspection and pure qualitative studies with obvious advantages.The present study takes “V+Off” construction as the research object.Guided by the framework of Construction Grammar,this study adopts the collostructional analysis and selects British National Corpus as the data source in an attempt to explore the semantic network and cognitive motivation of “V+Off” construction.This study aims at answering the following three questions:Firstly,what kind of verb slots are strongly attracted to “V+Off” construction and how are the verbs classified?Secondly,what are the constructional meanings of “V+Off” construction? How do the verbs interact with “V+Off” construction?Thirdly,how is the semantic network of “V+Off” construction established? What is the cognitive motivation of “V+Off” construction?In order to cope with the research questions above,the present study first determines all the eligible “V+Off” constructions through automatic search and manual elimination in British National Corpus.Then,by running the program of Coll.analysis 3.2a in R software,this study calculates the collostructional strength of all verb lexemes.WordNet 2.1 software is taken advantage of to classify the verbs,and then the semantic network and cognitive motivation of “V+Off” construction are discussed and analyzed.The findings of this study are summarized as below:First,the verb collexeme that is most strongly attracted to “V+Off” construction is take,followed by set,get,cut,switch,go,get,turn,etc.According to WordNet 2.1’s classification of verbs,this study classifies the top 50 verbs that show strong association with “V+Off” construction into 10 categories: motion verbs(34%);contact verbs(24%);verbs of change(12%);verbs of possession(8%);creation verbs(8%);verbs of body(4%);competition verbs(4%);perception verbs(2%);verbs of communication(2%);stative verbs(2%).As it can be seen,the motion verbs make up the largest proportion.Second,as analyzed,the prototypical meaning of “V+Off” construction is identified as “moving,departing”.Another seven types of atypical constructional meanings include: “ending,finishing,cancelling”,“removing,getting rid of”,“starting,causing”,“preventing,resisting”,“decreasing”,“displaying,deceiving,disliking”,“delaying”.Moreover,the interaction between verbs and “V+Off” construction mainly involves elaborations,forcedynamic relation,preconditions and co-occurring activity.Last,the seven types of atypical constructional meanings all extend from the prototypical meaning of “V+Off” construction through inheritance relation.Then,a semantic network of “V+Off” construction is established by means of polysemy links.Besides,the present study further digs into the motivation of “V+Off” construction and finds that it is owing to the synergy of construction inheritance relation,the role of verbs,the role of off and conceptual metaphor.By virtue of the collostructional analysis,the present study becomes more objective and scientific,and makes up for the drawbacks in previous pertinent studies.Moreover,it offers a new perspective for the studies on verb-particle constructions.In the meantime,this study is conducive to EFL learners’ understanding the meaning of verb-particle constructions in a better way.And EFL learners are also expected to replace rote memorization with intelligent memory.Hence,the present study can provide implications for the learning and teaching of verb-particle constructions.