抄録
This article presents an analysis of the historical development of the way-construction based on cognitive grammar. It emerges from a diachronic corpus-based investigation that the kinds of prepositions used in the way-construction tend to be fixed, whereas the kinds of verbs, originally restricted to verbs of creation, expanded to verbs that do not denote the creation of a path. To explain these facts, an analysis by means of a “Constructional Schema, ” which expresses a path along which the subject referent moves from an obstacle-zone to an obstacle-free-zone, is proposed. It is argued that the directionality of movement expressed by the Constructional Schema comes from the “Prototype” of the way-construction, which expresses locomotion by creating a new way. Furthermore, it is shown that the emergence of wend in the way-construction after 1800, and the marginal acceptability of some types of way-constructions in present-day English can be analyzed as the establishment and the extension of the Constructional Schema, respectively.
