| As an important pattern in Chinese,directional verb phrase expresses the dynamic positional relation between the moving subject and reference objects.It’s featured by high frequency of utilization and rich semantic meanings.Among various directional verb phrases,those collocating with directional complements“xia（下）”,“xiaqu（下去）”and“xialai（下来）”are of great concern to the scholars at home.However,previous studies pay much attention to the classification of directional complements as well as their the semantic categories,lacking in the discussion about the constructional meaning of“verb+xia（下）/xiaqu（下去）/xialai（下来）”.In the process of second language acquisition,the corresponding English structure“verb+down”is often misused by Chinese students under the influence of language transfer,which has a great deal to do with the semantic and cognitive differences between English and Chinese.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct a cognitive contrastive analysis of the two constructions so as to serve for the second language teaching.In recent years,few semantic researches have been conducted on the“verb+down”construction at home and abroad.And furthermore,there also exists a research gap in the semantic comparison between the“verb+xia（下）”and“verb+down”constructions.Under the guidance of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar,this study takes the Chinese “verb+xia（下）” construction and English “verb+down” construction as research objects and adopts Collostructional Analysis Method.Besides,required data are collected respectively from BCC and COCA corpora and are processed by means of Coll.Analysis 3.2a and R software.The collocational strength between collexemes and constructions is quantified to explore the meaning distribution of the Chinese and English constructions.Through making a contrastive analysis between them,it’s expected to bring some enlightenment for the contrastive study of constructions and second language teaching.This study attempts to address the following four questions:（1）What types of verbs are more strongly associated with the Chinese “verb+xia（下）”construction and English “verb+down” construction?（2）According to the verbs collocating with “xia（下）” and “down” respectively,what are the prototypical and atypical meanings of the target constructions and what kind of semantic category do they belong to?（3）How are semantic networks of the target constructions constructed?What are their respective semantic extension paths?（4）What are the similarities and differences between the Chinese “verb+xia（下）” construction and English “verb+down”construction?The results are as follows:Firstly,it’s shown that in Chinese,verb collexemes that are strongly associated with the“verb+xia（下）/xiaqu（下去）/xialai（下来）”construction include those denoting“the movement of bodies and objects”,“changing the position of objects”and“leaving,separating and removing”,etc.Besides,verbs in English expressing the meaning of“the movement of bodies and objects”,“changing the state of objects”,“changing the position of objects by external force”and so on are strongly attracted to the“verb+down”construction.It’s obvious that verbs denoting the meaning of spatial displacement in both English and Chinese are more strongly associated with their respective constructions.These types of verbs play an important role in identifying the prototypical meaning of the two constructions.Secondly,according to the classification of collocative meanings between verbs and“xia（下）/xiaqu（下去）/xialai（下来）”,it’s concluded that there are all together eleven constructional meanings in the“verb+xia（下）/xiaqu（下去）/xialai（下来）”construction,among which the prototypical meaning is identified as“moving from above to below”.All the constructional meanings are classified into four semantic categories:the directional meaning,the resultative meaning,the state meaning and the temporal meaning.Besides,there are nine constructional meanings in the“verb+down”construction and its prototypical meaning refers to“moving or causing something to move from above to below”.These constructional meanings are generalized into three major kinds,namely the directional meaning,the resultative meaning and the state meaning.Thirdly,the semantic networks of both Chinese and English constructions are established by means of cognitive mechanisms such as the Image Schema and Conceptual Metaphor.Moreover,in both constructions,the semantic extension from the prototypical meaning to extended meanings follows a multidimensional path.To be specific,the semantic evolution of Chinese construction is centered on the directional meaning,from which it extends to the resultative meaning,the state meaning and the temporal meaning respectively.As for the English construction,there are two semantic extension paths: one is from the directional meaning to the resultative meaning,and the other is from the directional meaning to the state meaning.Lastly,it’s found that the Chinese “verb+xia（下）” and the English “verb+down”constructions share some similarities but also differ from each other in terms of constructional meanings as well as semantic extension paths.With regard to the meaning distribution,their prototypical meanings are identical,that is,“moving from above to below”.Besides,other common meanings shared by them include “separating or removing something from another thing” and “making something remain in someplace”.Their differences lie in that the English construction is void of the temporal meaning and there exist some discrepancies in the resultative meaning and the state meaning.As for the semantic extension path,they both follow a multidimensional way.However,English construction has only two extension paths due to the lack of temporal meaning,while Chinese construction has three.The research findings prove that the Construction Grammar can not only be applied to the English constructions,but also to explain some Chinese language phenomena as well.Methodologically,Collostructional Analysis Method adopted in this study has a strong explanatory power for some linguistic structures and compensates for the lack of data evidence in previous studies.What’s more,it’s found that there are some semantic similarities and differences between similar English and Chinese constructions,which sheds light on the second language teaching and learning. |
PDF Full Text Request