Title: Construction and Rule: The Syntactic Commonality of English and Chinese Resultatives

Abstract: English resultative consfruction has been the focus of the research on the interaction between syntax and semantics, and it serves to be a central issue in exploring grammar. In the generative tradition, all the grammatical constructions are called ‘surface structure’ which is derived from a set of phrase structure rules. In the framework of cognitive-constructional linguistics, however, every construction constitutes a form-meaning pair which results from conventionalization. The meaning and function of a construction might alter the meaning and function of a verb. This article aims to identify the rules behind the application of resultatives and to explore the property of construction.

Keywords: construction, rule, resultative construction, generative linguistics, construction grammar, cognitive linguistics

Author: Yuzhi Shi, Professor, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.