Study On The Caused-motion Construction From The Perspective Of Lexicalization Patterns Theory

The thesis is based on the fact that: firstly,caused-motion is a concept which is fundamental to mankind’s empirical experience and is a consequence of people’s conceptualization of caused-motion events in the objective world.The linguistic community has studied and explored the generation mechanism,the conceptual framework,the phenomenon of constructional polysemy and partial productivity of the English caused-motion construction from different perspectives,but the analysis of its internal semantic components is rare.The internal semantics of the English caused-motion construction have mostly been analyzed from generative and cognitive perspectives,but these analyses are still inadequate.Secondly,since Talmy’s lexicalization pattern has been proposed,language scholars conduct a series of studies on the lexicalization patterns of motion events and motion verbs in different linguistic structures.However,at present,domestic scholars rarely analyse a single linguistic phenomenon from the perspective of lexicalization patterns,and their studies mostly focus on the comparative analysis of English and Chinese texts.Therefore,based on the above findings,this paper attempts to analyse the lexicalization patterns of the main motion events and co-events in different types of English caused-motion constructions from the perspective of lexicalization patterns,in an attempt to discover the relation borne by the co-event to the motion event with which it conflates in the different types of English caused-motion constructions.The findings of this study,viewed from the standpoint of lexicalization patterns,are as follows:（1）The analysis of the caused-motion meaning of verbs of motion events in English caused-motion constructions reveals that when a verb and a prepositional phrase indicating a directional constituent occur together,the verb will be lexicalized and incorporated into the semantic constituent of the prepositional phrase,thus acquiring the semantic meaning of caused-motion.（2）The analysis of the lexicalization patterns of the semantic constituent from the co-event in the caused-motion constructions reveals that the differences in the lexicalization patterns of the co-event in different types of English caused-motion constructions can be represented by deep verbs or mid-level verbs respectively;（3）The relationship between the co-event and the motion event with which it conflates is also different in different types of English caused-motion constructions,and the three main types are the precursion,the enablement and the causation.The following contributions are made in this paper: firstly,this thesis makes an analysis of the lexicalization patterns of the semantic constituents of the verb of the motion event and of the co-event in the English caused-motion construction as viewed from the standpoint of lexicalization patterns.Secondly,the study presents a new perspective to the study of the semantic lexicalization patterns of English caused-motion constructions in cognitive semantics.Finally,this paper introduces the lexicalization relationship between motion events and co-events in the caused-motion construction,which is helpful for English learners to better grasp English caused-motion construction from a theoretical perspective.