Construction, Domain Matrix and Construal: A Cognitive Grammar Account of “chi shitang”

In this article, sentences with argument alternation represented by “chi shitang”(eat canteen) in Mandarin are couched in the spirit of cognitive grammar.It is concluded that there are two determinants that are crucial to argument alternation, viz.the conceptual potential of verb semantics and the sanction from higherlevel constructions.At the same time, construal operations, including profile shift, the adjustment of specificity and prominence, are also of great significance.Specifically there are two conditions that sanction sentences like “chi shitang”, viz.the correspondence relationship between the verb “chi” and the alternating argument “shitang” as well as the sanction from transitive constructional schema.Firstly, correspondence is brought about by profile adjustment influenced by the switch between cognitive domains of a verb, the motivation of which is the shift of construal, including the defocusing of food argument and the centralization of setting.Secondly, the consequences of partial sanction lie in the deviation of the expression’s compositional meaning from the semantics of transitive constructional schema.Hence the expression is equipped with idiosyncratic constructional meaning and comparatively low transitivity, the motivation of the latter comes from voice alternation based on different ways of construal.