A Diachronic Construction Grammar Account Of The Development Of English Speech Verb Pragmatic Markers

The thesis discusses the English speech verb pragmatic marker(SVPM)construction “ADV.+V.-ing”,which is composed of an adverb plus the present participle form of a speech verb.According to the data from the corpora COCA and COHA,the speech verbs fitting this construction are speaking,saying,and telling,with“ADV.+speaking” being the most frequent.Since “ADV.+telling” only appears four times as a pragmatic marker,this thesis mainly studies the constructional network of“ADV.+V.-ing” and the diachronic development of its two subschema constructions“ADV.+speaking” and “ADV.+saying”.At present,the diachronic development of the English SVPM construction “ADV.+V.-ing” has not received much attention,and there is not much relevant discussion from the perspective of construction grammar.Nevertheless,in the field of cognitive linguistics,construction grammar mainly concerns syntactic and semantic issues,with little attention to the pragmatic aspects of constructions,and pragmatics touches little on issues of constructions as well.In view of this,based on the framework of diachronic construction grammar,this study explores the synchronic features and diachronic development of the English SVPM construction “ADV.+V.-ing” from the perspective of constructional network and with the help of the COCA,COHA and EEBO corpus.By combining synchronic with diachronic analysis,descriptive with explanatory adequacy,and introspection with corpus-based approach,this thesis mainly focuses on the post-constructionalization constructional changes of the English SVPM construction “ADV.+V.-ing” and three questions are aimed to be answered:(1)What are the frequency distribution,syntactic,register,pragmatic,and semantic features of the English SVPM “ADV.+V.-ing” construction?(2)How does the constructional network of the English SVPM “ADV.+V.-ing” construction evolve horizontally and vertically?(3)What are the mechanisms and motivations of the development of the English SVPM “ADV.+V.-ing” constructional network?The major findings of the study are as follows:Firstly,in the synchronic analysis of “ADV.+V.-ing”,its frequency distribution,syntactic,register and pragmatic features are discussed.“ADV.+speaking” has the highest frequency followed by “ADV.+saying”.The syntactic distribution of“ADV.+V.-ing” is flexible,appearing mostly at the beginning of clauses,sometimes in the middle of clauses,and rarely at the end of clauses.The frequency of this construction in the seven genres of academic text,fiction,popular magazine,movie subtitles,newspaper,spoken and TV is nearly evenly distributed.The predominant function of “ADV.+V.-ing” is the subjective function to express personal opinions and attitudes.Diachronically,with the help of the corpus analysis tool Wmatrix,the semantic meanings of “ADV.+speaking” mainly concentrate on five semantic domains:manner and degree,society and culture,natural science,politics and economy,and thinking and psychology while that of “ADV.+saying” mainly focus on manner and degree.Secondly,regarding the constructional network evolution of the schematic pragmatic marker construction “ADV.+V.-ing”,horizontal and vertical links between nodes are discussed.Within the constructional network of “ADV.+V.-ing”,there are two subschema constructions “ADV.+speaking” and “ADV.+saying”.Additionally,it is worth noting that another emerging subschema construction “ADV.+telling” has been found,but its occurrence frequency in the corpus is still relatively low.The horizontal change is accompanied by an increase in productivity,reflected in the growing number of micro-constructions.The original meaning of “ADV.+V.-ing” is contentful while pragmatic markers are procedural.A procedural construction is more abstract than a contentful construction.Thus,the schematicity of “ADV.+V.-ing” increases.Thirdly,in the formation and development of the schematic pragmatic marker construction “ADV.+V.-ing”,it underwent two mechanisms(analogization and neoanalysis)and two motivations(analogical thinking and subjectivity).Since“ADV.+speaking” and “ADV.+saying” are morphologically,syntactically,and pragmatically similar,the use of “ADV.+speaking” as pragmatic markers enables the development of “ADV.+saying” as pragmatic markers by analogization,forming the schematic pragmatic marker construction “ADV.+V.-ing”.Then by analogization of the schema construction “ADV.+V.-ing”,the subschema construction “ADV.+telling”forms although with very low frequency.When “ADV.+V.-ing” is used as pragmatic markers,the lexical meanings of the three speech verbs have been blurred,only indicating the speaker’s or author’s attitude towards a certain fact.The subjectivity of the three speech verbs is manifested in the weakening of their verbal part,from expressing declarative meaning to manifesting cognitive meaning and finally mainly expressing the speaker’s subjective cognition.In summary,combing the studies of constructions with pragmatic studies is vital,which not only deals with the disadvantages of traditional studies which may only attach importance to one side of the form or meaning but also is conducive to examining the pragmatic aspects of constructions.Moreover,taking on the holistic view of constructional network,not only the changes of any level of abstraction or links between different nodes within the schematic pragmatic marker construction“ADV.+V.-ing” can be described but also the formation of new nodes in the network,achieving the unity of the whole and the parts,the macro level and the micro level.