A Linguistic Typological Study of the Locative Alternation Construction

This paper attempts to combine linguistic typology and construction grammar, making a cross-linguistic typological study on the locative alternation construction.It analyses the families,word order and geographical distribution of 30 languages with the locative alternation construction, and in the perspective of language universals, summarizes 7 main typological features.In terms of the two main competing motivations of Identifiability Precedence and Semantic Proximity, it discusses the word order formation mechanism of the locative alternation construction and explains the difference between "totally affected" and "partially affected", thus attesting the patterns of the locative alternation which are logically derived.