A Diachronic Study Of The Emergent Cluster "N+ Head"

From a constructionist view,this study systematically investigated the emergence mechanism of the "N+head" cluster.Most of the previous research on body-part-suffixed compounds concentrated on synchronic semantic analysis and ignored the excavation of solid diachronic evidence to support their introspective argumentation.This study was designed to merge this research gap and managed to answer three research questions:1)What constructions are aggregated under the "N+head" cluster?2)What are the associations between these constructions?and 3)How do these different constructions emerge as a cluster?Combining theoretical analysis of cognitive linguistics and statistical methodology of corpus linguistics,this study attempted to offer a panoramic view of diachronic changes happening to "N+head" constructions.With the assistance of Variability-based Neighbor Clustering(VNC),multitudinous raw data extracted from the Corpus of Historical American English(COHA)was successfully periodized into five stages,based on their normalized token frequency.After manual annotation of concerned linguistic features,the annotated data in the five periods was subjected to Multiple Correspondence Analysis(MCA),which calculated and visualized the correlations between variables and generated an MCA map.Through observing the diachronic changes in linguistic features and the associations between variables on the MCA map,four maj or constructions in the "N+head" cluster were summarized and their connections were analyzed.Supported by historical recordings in dictionaries,the emergence mechanism of this cluster was discussed.It was found that there are mainly four constructions in this cluster and some of them are tightly associated with each other,from which the clue of constructionalization from one construction to another can be easily detected.The alternate activation of constructionalization and constructional changes is the main momentum of the expansion of the "N+head"cluster.New constructions evolve out of extant constructions.The expansion of collocations and adjustment of conceptual integration are the main postconstructionalization constructional changes fueling new turns of constructionalizaiton.In addition,it was also discovered that metaphor and metonymy play important roles in the establishment of constructional meanings.On this basis,we deliberated on the appropriateness of the traditional definition of "form" and put forward a constructionist definition taking conceptualization into consideration,that form is supposed to be defined as the conceptual organization of components in a construction.In conclusion,this study satisfactorily solved our research questions.The constructional hierarchy composed of four major "N+head" constructions were sketched and the developing path of the expansive cluster was depicted by connecting the associations between constructions.Generally,this study shed light on the development of the "N+head" cluster with convincing diachronic evidence and offered a new scope for investigating noun-noun compounding.