A Construction Grammar Approach To Do So In English

The do so construction is widely used in English but has received relatively little attention in the literature compared with verb phrase ellipsis.From the investigation on previous studies,scholars mainly focus on the do so construction from syntactic and semantic perspective.They take different view on the syntactic structure of the do so anaphor,and part of the reason is that some have not noticed that do so exists as a whole and they only make sense when do and so appear adjacent to each other in a sentence,thus they cannot be analyzed separately.Based on previous studies and their deficiencies,this thesis will provide a new perspective to study do so by adopting Adele E.Goldberg’s Construction Grammar theory.From the perspective of Construction Grammar,this thesis attempts to explore the following three questions:(1)What is the constructional meaning of do so?(2)How is the do so construction produced?(3)What are the pragmatic motivations of the do so construction?With these questions in mind,this thesis can be divided into three parts.In the first part,we will prove why do so is considered to be a construction based on the Goldberg’s definition of Construction and what syntactic and semantic properties it has,and then the meaning of the do so construction will be discussed.The second part is the study of the production of the do so construction,that is,how this construction comes into being.It can be expounded by means of inheritance.The third part will analyze why the do so construction comes into being since it have long been assumed that it is largely interchangeable with other Verb Phrase anaphors,such as do it,do that,etc.According to the principle of no synonymy proposed by Goldberg(1995),we know that if two constructions are syntactically distinct and semantically synonymous,then they must be pragmatically different.The do so construction is different from do it and do that in form but have the same meaning,thus they are different in pragmatic aspect.Major findings are as follows:(1)The constructional meaning of the do so construction is pragmatic,it means that someone performs an action that is consistent with the linguistic antecedent.That is to say,we must infer its meaning from the previous context.(2)The do so construction is related to the do X construction and the X so construction by inheritance.It has inherited the constructional meaning of the do in the do X construction and the so in the X so construction.It is the result of their joint actuation.(3)The irreplaceablity of the do so construction and the economy principle in language can be seen as pragmatic motivations of its existence,which can explain why the do so construction comes into being.This thesis offers a new research perspective to the study of the do so construction.It is hoped to help us get a better understanding of this construction and to provide references for other do X constructions’ study,for example,the study of do it,do that,do the same thing,etc.The research results on the do so construction is expected to make some contributions to language teaching.