A Study On The Representation Of Ditransitive Construction From Cognitive Perspective

Cognitive linguistics has claimed a special place in dictionary building and attracted much attention from scholars and linguists in recent years.However,few of the studies are applied to dictionary practice.Ditransitive construction,as the basic sentence type in English,causes much trouble for Chinese EFL learners.To address this problem and to help learners better learn ditransitive construction through dictionaries,this thesis explores how to better present ditransitive construction in English-Chinese dictionaries.In order to understand the manifestation of ditransitive construction by Chinese learners and offer feasible suggestions for future ECLDs,this thesis studies the semantic features of ditransitive construction,the problems and preference that learners have in the acquisition of ditransitive construction,and the deficiencies of existing ECLDs in the representation of ditransitive construction.Construction Grammar is adopted to reveal the semantic features of ditransitive construction.Two corpora,viz.WECCL and COCA are explored to understand the situation of Chinese learners’ use of different types of English ditransitive construction.A dictionary survey and questionnaire are conducted to reveal the main deficiencies of current ECLDs.The findings are:1)Chinese EFL learners have acquired the basic knowledge of ditransitive verbs,able to use them correctly in ditransitive constructions.In this case,Chinese learners have a similar preference in using positive-giving verbs as native speakers do.As for the potential giving verbs,learners tend to use verbs of communication and verbs of creation.Verbs of instantaneous causation of motion,verbs of the instrument of communication,and verbs of selecting are almost avoided by Chinese EFL learners,and verbs of obtaining are less preferred compared to native speakers.Moreover,learners commit the most error in those words that are ditransitive verbs in Chinese but not in English.However,learners still use such words in ditransitive structures.2)The deficiencies of current ECLDs in representing ditransitive construction cover two aspects.First of all,for non-ditransitive verbs that users tend to misuse,few of them are especially noted to avoid being used in ditransitive construction.Some synonyms also have similar meanings in Chinese,and students are not able to distinguish them well,but such words are treated differently in the same dictionary without any cross-reference or usage notes.Then for ditransitive verbs,the most noticeable problem is the decentralized distribution of ditransitive construction in a single word entry.Verb-patterns or grammatical codes sometimes have problems on their own.Some verb-patterns are relatively vague.The definitions of dictionaries are either too broad,mostly using phrase-definition without concerning any construction,or too narrow,that is,adopting limited sentence definition.In addition,the Chinese part of the headword is limited in only offering equivalents or translation,failing to reflect the semantic structure of the source language.Accordingly,five pieces of suggestions as well as a representation model are proposed to overcome the dictionaries’ deficiencies.The suggestions are as follows:a.Providing abundant usages notes and warning to English transitive verbs whose Chinese equivalents can be used in ditransitive construction;b.Applying a multidimensional model of definition for ditransitive verbs;c.Verb-patterns or grammatical codes of a ditransitive verb should be transparent and grouped;d.The Chinese equivalents and translation should reveal the semantic features of the source language;e.Attaching an individual page to list all the ditransitive verbs and their constructions in the dictionary,and introducing them in details to inform students of the knowledge of ditransitive construction.This is just a tentative study on the representation of ditransitive construction in ECLDs,hoping to be of some significance in future study and dictionary compiling practice.