A Construction Grammar Perspective To The Ditransitive Construction Of Non-volitional Arguments

The ditransitive construction is the important and frequently used linguistic pattern in human language system, which has been a hot topic recently both home and abroad. The previous study can be divided into three approaches, structural, transformational, and the cognitive approach. With the help of these approaches, great achievements have been made. However, there are also some problems and drawbacks. For example, a large number of scholars have done an extensive research on typical meaning of ditransitive construction—"the successful transfer of patient from the agent to recipient."Therefore, there is space for the study of ditransitive construction of non-volitional arguments. This thesis tries to give a more satisfactory explanation on this particular linguistic phenomenon according to Construction Grammar.The ditransitive construction of this thesis involves the double object construction and the dative construction. According to the definition of construction, the grammatical structure of ditransitive construction includes NP+V+NP1+NP2 and NP+V+NPI+P+NP2 (P is the proposition) while the typical meaning is"agent successfully causes recipient to receive patient". Though both the agent and patient who are to discuss and analyze is non-volitional, namely, inanimate, they are accepted with the help of the mechanism of metaphor and metonymy. The predicate verb in the ditransitive construction of non-volitional arguments not only include the typical verbs such as"give", but also ones which are not typical such as"allow, leave."In order to give an extensive study on the ditransitive construction, this thesis analyses the semantic constraints on the agent, patient, recipient. Moreover, some classifications on the agent and recipient have been done according to their acceptance. Meanwhile, this thesis also claims that the powerful production of ditransitvie construction leads to connection with other constructions such as caused-motion construction, the way-construction.According to their semantic relations, this thesis tries to reclassify the ditransitive construction of non-volitional arguments into four types, causality, conditional, manner, and concession relation. Because the ditransitive construction of non-volitional arguments are widely used in English writing nowadays. One aim of this thesis is to help people understand this better.