A Corpus-based Study Of Prototype Meaning In Causative Construction "SUB+MAKE+it+ADJ"

Construction grammar,which is introduced by Fillmore in the 1980 s to analyze idioms and fixed expressions,takes construction---“form and meaning pairing”(Goldberg,1995)as its primary analyzing unit.Fillmore(1982)argued that “the meaning of an expression was not simply a function of the meanings of its parts”.Instead,he suggested,“constructions themselves must have meanings”.In two papers issued in 1995 and 2003,Goldberg analyzed some types of causative structure.Altenburg and Granger(2001)studied the grammatical and lexical patterning of“make” in native and non-native student writing.Recently,Chinese researchers began to be interested in the exploration of prototype meanings of various constructions and interactions between a collexeme and construction(Hu,2013;Fang,2018;Zhang,2019).Most previous studies focused more on some general constructions and lacked adequate quantitative data to support their research.Hence,a corpus-based approach is adopted to investigate the prototype meanings of the causative construction“SUB+MAKE+it+ADJ” from the cognitive perspective.First,regular expressions are designed to retrieve collexemes in ADJ slot from the target construction in BNC and COCA;second,retrieved collexemes which have significant relevance to the target construction are manually confirmed according to their collostructional strength;third,enlightened by the semantic classification of adjectives proposed by Quirk(1978,1985)and Lin(2009),the author adjusts the classification framework to clarify meaning categories of the observed collexemes;and finally,according to the“semantic coherence principle”(Goldberg,1995)in construction grammar and prototype category theory,the prototypical and extended meanings of the target construction are analyzed.Three questions are addressed in this study:1.What types of adjectives are most strongly attracted to the target construction and widely distributed in BNC and COCA?2.What are the prototypical semantic features of these adjectives? And what kinds of prototype meaning of the target construction can be reflected?3.What are the extended meanings of the target construction?The results show that:(1)The stative,subjective adjectives and markedness adjectives are most strongly attracted to the target construction and widely distributed.(2)The prototypical semantic features of these adjectives fall into four categories,namely,“comments”,“aspiration”,“necessity” and “descriptiveness”.(3)The prototype meaning of the target construction is “to cause a stative change of state to achieve one’s criterion or intention by putting something into practice”.Three extended meanings of the target construction are mainly established: “to improve/lower the subjective/objective value or dimension of something to satisfy one’s willing by putting something into effect.”;“to cause the internal changes of state in the same dimension(changes of degree compared with the original one)by doing something and “to cause the external changes of state in two opposite dimensions(the state changes from positive-negative/negative-positive)by doing something.