A Cognitive Semantic Study Of English “Verb+up” Nonstruction

The “verb + particle” construction has always been an important topic in linguistics because of its high frequency of use and its semantic complexity.Scholars in this field have studied the semantic and syntactic features of this structure from the traditional and cognitive perspectives.Traditional studies have been conducted in the light of generative grammar theory and functional grammar theory,while cognitive studies have been conducted mainly within the framework of cognitive linguistics.However,to date,how the “verb +particle” construction encodes the five macro-events has been scarcely studied.Given that,this thesis takes the “V+up” construction as the object of study and tries to address the following three questions in the light of construction grammar and Talmy’s macro-event theory:(1)What kinds of verbs are characteristically employed in the “V+up” construction?(2)What are the senses of the particle up employed in the “V+up” construction and how are these senses distributed across the five macro-events through semantic extension?(3)How does the “V+up” construction encode the five macro-events proposed by Leonard Talmy and how are different degrees of idiomaticity manifested in the “V+up” construction with respect to the five macro-events?This study is based on the data mainly collected from COCA.The major findings of the study are as follows:1)166 verbs are attracted to the “V+up” construction,which can be divided into 10 categories.Among these categories,the largest number of verbs is in the category of “verbs of change of state”,followed by “verbs of spatial movement”,together accounting for 50.60%.This finding suggests that most of the verbs permitted to enter this construction are verbs that express dynamic change.2)The meaning of particle up in the “V+up” construction can be divided into 7 categories,of which “upward motion” in the spatial domain is the prototypical meaning,while the other meanings in non-spatial domains are derived from it by metaphorical extension.In the motion event,up denotes the upward movement.In the state-change event,the meaning of up begins to shift from literal meaning to abstract meaning.In the rest three types of macro-event,up serves as a marker of perfective aspect,denoting the completion of an action encoded by the main verb.3)The “V+up” construction can characterize all the five macro-events proposed by Talmy,of which the action correlating event is less frequent in our corpus.According to the different degrees of idiomaticity,the “V+up”constructions representing these events fall into three types,namely,semantically transparent,semi-idiomatic,and fully idiomatic.In the motion event,both the particle up and the verb retain their core meanings,so the constructions are semantically transparent.In the state-change event,up has a variety of meanings with varying degrees of grammaticalization while most of the verbs retain their literal meaning,with some working together with the particle to convey an opaque meaning.Thus,the “V+up” constructions in the state-change event can be semantically transparent,semi-idiomatic,or even fully idiomatic.In the temporal contouring event and the realization event,up is used as an aspectual marker,while the verbs may or may not retain their original meanings.Thus,the construction may be semi-idiomatic or fully idiomatic.In the action correlating event,up denotes the aspectual meaning and the verbs retain their original meanings.Thus,the constructions are semiidiomatic.This study adopts the method of collostructional analysis,which contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between the verbs and the construction.And the in-depth analysis of the semantic categories of the verbs and the particle up adds to our understanding of the composition and functions of the “V+up” construction.Moreover,the macro-event approach represents a further step towards the research on the “verb + particle”construction in general and the “V+up” construction in particular.