| The English Nominative and Infinitive(NCI)construction is a structure consisting of a subject,an optional tensed form of the verb be,a past participle form of a verb and a to-infinitive,such as be proposed to,be said to,etc.In previous studies,NCI structure is only discussed as a passive structural alternative to the Accusative and Infinitive(ACI)construction.But in the field of construction grammar,NCI construction usually has symbolic values which are quite different from that of the ACI construction and the passive.No(?)l(2008)points out that in English the NCI does become a form-meaning paired construction with schematization and productivity and grows to be very useful in discourses.As a methodology of language research,construction grammar has attracted continuous attention in recent years and has become one of the research hotspots in the field of international linguistics.Based on it,the research on NCI construction has made some progress in recent years.However,the existing researches mainly focus on some specific cases of it,such as be supposed to,be found to,and there is relatively little research on schematic NCI construction.In addition,most existing studies have focused on a single specific meaning or function of NCI construction,and failed to form a systematic description and interpretation of the construction.In view of this,from the perspective of constructionalization and constructional change theory,combined with construction grammar and usage-based model,this thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis to analyze the constructional meanings,development path and mechanism of constructional change of NCI construction one by one,in order to systematically understand the constructional meanings and characteristics of constructional change of schematic NCI construction,which can further affirm its constructional status and specific symbolic values,expand the research space and perspective of construction grammar,and provide a methodological reference for constructional research to a certain extent.The research specifically answers the following questions:(1)What kinds of verbs can occur in the V slot in NCI construction?(2)How do the verbs in the V slot interact with NCI construction to produce constructional meanings,and what constructional meanings can be generalized?(3)Do different constructional meanings of NCI construction share the same development path? Why?To answer the above questions,the present thesis takes the COHA corpus as the data source and exhaustively searches the NCI constructions in the corpus.Firstly,we input the retrieval formula of NCI construction in the COHA corpus to extract all NCI constructions in the corpus,and merge them according to the same verb entries to obtain the data on the type frequency of verbs and the target construction.On the basis of verbs,the data of token frequency of NCI construction in each time period from 1820 to 2019 is retrieved to form the original data table.Next,through the Collexeme Analysis method,the collostructional strength between verbs and NCI construction is calculated,and used to analyze the relationship between verbs and the target construction.On this basis,the thesis makes a classification of the verbs entering NCI construction,and then analyzes and generalizes the constructional meanings of NCI construction combined with sentence instances in the corpus.Finally,apply VNC algorithm with R software to divide the different stages of various verb data,to analyze the development path of each constructional meaning of NCI construction.Then combined with the theory of constructionalization and constructional change,the thesis analyzes the cognitive mechanism of constructional change of the target construction.The main research findings are as follows:(1)A total of 321 verbs retrieved from the COHA corpus can enter the verb slot of NCI construction,of which the verb with the highest frequency is expected,followed by said,made,allowed,forced,observed,bound,used,compelled,prepared,etc.The first12 verbs appear more than 5000 times in NCI construction,and the first 49 verbs appear more than 1000 times in the construction.Among the 321 collexemes,289 verbs have an attractive relationship with NCI construction,and the first 120 collexemes show infinite collostructional strength with the target construction,and only 32 verbs have a repulsion relationship with it.This shows that NCI construction is a productive schema construction,which allows a large number of verbs to enter.Verbs appearing in NCI construction have the certain tendency.Based on the classification standard of verbs of Levin(1993)and Biber,Conrad and Leech(2000),combined with the collostructional strength,we make a classification of all verbs.Combining the type frequency and token frequency,the classification results show that mental verbs,verbs of possession,verbs of communication,verbs of motion,causative verbs and verbs of creation and transformation account for a large proportion,and the proportions of verbs of change,verbs of social interaction and appoint verbs are relatively low.The remaining 24 verbs cannot enter these nine categories,for most of them appearing in a single category,so they are classified as other verbs.(2)According to the type frequency,token frequency and distribution of various verbs,combined with the qualitative analysis of sentence examples of various verb classes entering NCI construction in the COHA corpus,we make a generalization of the constructional meanings of NCI construction.The results show that NCI construction has constructional polysemy.In the interaction with mental verbs,the core meaning of NCI construction is to represent someone’s epistemic stance,specifically,the subject is psychologically thought to do something by someone.Under the interaction with verbs of communication,verbs of possession,verbs of motion,causative verbs and verbs of creation and transformation,five extended meanings of the construction can be generalized: 1)the subject is said to have done something or is driven to do something by someone’s utterance;2)the possession of the subject is changed in order to do something;3)the subject is enabled to do something passively;4)the subject is created to do something;5)the subject makes a motion passively to do something.In addition,with the interaction with verbs of social interaction,appoint verbs and verbs of change,the construction has three marginal meanings: 1)the subject passively participates in social activities to do something;2)the social position or social state of the subject is changed in order to do something;3)a certain aspect or characteristic of the subject is changed to do something.(3)Combined with the analysis of the development stages divided by VNC algorithm,the development paths of most constructional meanings of NCI construction show the same trend.The core meaning of the construction presents the development path of a continuous relative frequency reduction in each stage.Similar to the core meaning,the extended meanings(1),(2),(3),(5)and marginal meanings(1)(2)also show the development path of a continuous relative frequency reduction in each stage.The extended meaning(4)presents the development path of an alternation of frequency reduction and growth in different stages.Marginal meaning(3)demonstrates the development path of expanding in the first two stages,and then reducing in the last stage.From 1820 s to 2010 s,the productivity of the core meaning,most extended meanings and marginal meanings of NCI construction continues to decrease,and the productivity of individual extended meaning and marginal meaning increases in some stages.In the process of the constructional change of NCI construction,the productivity of it is decreased,the schematization is decreased,and the compositionality is increased.In the process of the expansion of the constructional meanings of NCI construction,it is mainly affected by the cognitive mechanism of analogization.Along with the constructional change of the construction,the core meaning,most extended meanings and marginal meanings experience an obsolescence effect with lower productivity due to the reduction of use frequency.The results of the thesis confirm the independent constructional status of NCI construction,provide a new research perspective for NCI construction research and diachronic construction grammar research,and also have a certain reference value for the practical application of NCI construction. |
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