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Abstract The three-word phrasal verb, or “Verb + Adverb + Preposition (VAP)” construction, is a sub-category of English phrasal verb construction. Its semantic complexity is mainly reflected in two important features: opacity and polysemy. By exhaustively extracting VAP constructions from the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, and taking a typical example (“go in for”) for illustration, we explored its mechanism of semantic generation based on the principles of conceptual integration. The following results were obtained. Firstly, the three components constitute conceptual resources for constructional meaning via accommodation whereby the multipath coding process contributes to opacity and polysemy of the construction. Secondly, principles of metaphtonymy and selection-salience coercion play a key role in the process of conceptual integration, emergence of the new meanings, and constructional polysemy. As the trigger of selective-salience coercion, the argument structure of the construction activates the accommodated conceptual elements and plays an important role in elaborating and distinguishing the construction meanings and in forming the emergent space. Thirdly, the construction also has the ability to generate new meanings. The study also suggests that selection-salience coercion is a useful supplement to the mechanism of metaphtonymy in explaining the semantic generation mechanism of the VAP constructions.
Key words: VAP construction; conceptual integration; metaphtonymy; selective-salience coercion
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