CHAPTER 2 Literature review

This chapter reviews what previous linguistic studies have done in categorizing break verbs. Section 2.1 elaborates how classical linguistics makes use of grammatical minimal pairs in differentiating break verbs from other verb classes. Section 2.2 reveals how generative semantic studies argue for the categorization of break verbs based on causative alternation. Section 2.3 summarizes how developmental psycholinguistics utilizes children's language acquisition as evidence to prove that knowledge of break verbs is not universal. Section 2.4 accounts for how five cognitive approaches argue for the identification of break verbs, including cognitive extensionalist studies, NSM, Frame Semantics, Causal Chain as well as Talmy's Macro-event. Section 2.5 elaborates the limited number of diachronic syntactic and constructional studies on break verbs. Section 2.6 reviews diachronic Chinese linguistic studies on lexical semantic change. Section 2.7 concludes these previous studies and points out the necessity for a diachronic study on conceptual variation.