2023 Volume 2 Pages 58-68
This paper aims to manifest the advent of a new type of collocation, eat your medicine, and its increasing use over the past years from perspectives of syntax-semantics and social functions. Discussion on the eat your medicine collocation in this paper starts with different verbs or verb phrases in different languages employed to verbalize an act or event of consuming oral medication to treat illnesses. Then, we shift our attention to the English verb eat, whose usages fall into three types, Type A and Type B based on a syntactic-semantic viewpoint and Type C based on a viewpoint of social functions. Next, the Object, Instrument, and Subevent parameters are proposed to investigate the eat your medicine phenomenon. Finally, the paper verifies that (a) an Object plays a distinctively different role in each of the three types of eat collocation; (b) in terms of an Instrument in an eat collocation, Type A implies the use of an Instrument, Type B requires the use of an Instrument, and Type C options the use of an Instrument; and (c) as to the Subevent parameter in an eat collocation, Subevent 1 (to take into the mouth) and Subevent 3 (to swallow) are mandatory in all types while Subevent 2 (to masticate) is arbitrary in Types A and C and generally does not exist in Type B.
