Title: A Collostructional Analysis of “V+down” Construction and Its Semantic Mapping: A Corpus-Based Approach

Abstract: Based on COCA corpus analysis and constructional analysis, the study first checks collostructional strength of the verbs in “V+down”, then examines the semantic clustering of these cooccurring verbs and semantic mapping of this construction. The main findings show that: (1) most of the verbs occurring in the “V+down” construction represent spatial motion or a bad result state; (2) the prototypical semantics of “V+down” construction is “to move downward”, and its semantic extensions are realized by metaphorical mapping from the spatial domain to the social, psychological and the physical domain, so that the construction has rich metaphorical meanings. The collostructional analysis of “V+down” construction and its cognitive semantic research using corpus-based approach is a further application of the collostructional analysis method. Furthermore, it is enlightening for foreign language teaching in the “verb-particle” construction.

Keywords: “V+down” construction, Collostructional Analysis, constructional meaning

Authors: Guobing Liu, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Henan Normal University, Xinxiang, Henan, China; Mohan Zhang, Ph.D. Candidate, Faculty of International Studies, Henan Normal University, Xinxiang, Henan, China.