earticle

영어

This study aims to explore the relationship between meaning and syntactic form with reference to English causative constructions in terms of a theory of iconicity developed by Haiman(1980, 1983, 1985a, 1985b). By analyzing the causative constructions relying on Haiman's(1980) iconicity theory, I try to show the explanatory power of the distance principle, which is one of the most important principles in the theory.
It is shown that according to the scale of the distance principle of the iconicity theory, the formal distance between the expressions of cause and effect is largest in the analytic causatives and shortest in the lexical causatives, whereas the morphological causatives are between the two. Based on this observation, a proposal is made that the length of the linguistic distance between the causer and the causee corresponds to the conceptual distance between the two. This means that if the linguistic distance is greater between the two elements, the causer will have more influence on the causee, less depend on the causee, and achieve greater success of manipulation.
The distance principle is also argued to be more appealing than any other schema because it is laid on human cognitive process and said to indicate the necessity of paying due attention to both arbitrariness and iconicity to explicitly explain various syntactic phenomena.