A Construction Grammar Approach to Inverted Resultatives
Yi Zhang · Waiguoyu · 2009
In spite of being a widely-used structure,the Inverted Resultative Construction has not received sufficient attention in linguistic research.The formalists usually approach this construction from the perspective of the semantic ambiguity of resultatives.This approach not only has technical flaws,but more importantly,it overlooks the construction's independent status in language use,as well as its formal and semantic features.As a type of cognitive construction,the inverted resultatives convey the meaning of unexpected causations and results.It has the prototypical form of NP1 + V1 + V2 + NP2,but in actual usage,the construction can be realized in a number of variations.These formal features,which have inner cognitive motivations and can be explained in terms of its construction meaning and general cognitive abilities,reveal the match between the construction components and the construction meaning as a whole.