고등학교 교과서에 나타나는 사역구문 분석

Abstract

This study analyzes the causative constructions in the first-year high school English textbooks. Its main goal is to show the relationship between meaning and syntactic form in terms of a theory of Iconicity developed by Haiman (1980, 1983) and Givon(1985, 1993). Korean students usually try to memorize some grammar rules in class without understanding what they mean and how they should accept their meaning. So I try to show the explanatory power of the Distance Principle, which is one of the main principles of Iconicity theory, for causative constructions. At first, three kinds of causative constructions were observed and compared: the lexical causative, the morphological causative, and the analytic causative. According to the scale of the Distance Principle (Haiman 1983), it was shown that the linguistic distance between the expressions of cause and effect was largest in the analytic causatives, the next in the morphological causatives, and shortest in the lexical causatives. They were analyzed in meaning semantically, and then I might say that the length of the formal distance between the cause and the effect corresponds to the conceptual distance between them. Then, if the linguistic distance is greater between the two elements, the causer will have more influence on the causee, depend less on the causee, and achieve greater success in manipulation. I show this using the sentences in the high school textbooks. Furthermore, it was possible to explain the difference of meaning in causative verb complements of the analytic causatives, because there were linguistic distances between bare and to-infinitive complements, and between small clauses and to-infinitive complements. But they are not explained on the scale of Haiman and Givon, so I tried to analyze them syntactically. On the syntactic ground, I extend the Distance Principle of Iconicity to complementation and confirm the meaning difference between them. In conclusion, considering the Iconicity theory, it is advisable that the causative constructions should be taught to students with respect to both their syntactic and semantic aspects. That will help students to understand the meaning sense of those causative constructions better and use them properly.