A Quantitative Analysis of the Semantic Relations Between Verbs and Constructions

There exists some correspondence between verb-construction relations and their usage distributions.The verb-construction relations are mainly semantic in nature, and their usage distributions are manifested in terms of frequency of constructions in use.The integration of verb meaning and constructional meaning can be used to account for fully-matched and partially-matched constructions.But it is not applicable to unmatched constructions.Nor is it applicable to the tendencies of usage distributions.From the viewpoints of unification-based grammar, this paper argues that legitimate and acceptable constructions all adhere to the fine-grained "Semantic Property Coherence Principle".The coherent conceptual contents must also include unexpressed conceptual meanings.Following the view of usage-based grammar, the authors propose the Usage Distributions Hypothesis, which states that usage frequency is correlated with the tendency of usage distributions.The paper argues with rich quantitative data that the degree of verb-construction coherence via semantic properties is related with the frequency of their use.This research also supports the complementarity between the usage-based grammar and the unification-based grammar and the adequacy of Cognitive Event Frame.