A Study Of English And Chinese Ditransitive Construction Based On Event Structure Theory

Ditransitive construction is very common in English and Chinese and has been one of the focuses of research by English and Chinese linguists.Scholars at home and abroad have carried out many studies on it,especially from the perspective of construction grammar.Event structure theory is a syntactic-semantic interface theory that applies events and event structures for the study of syntactic-lexical semantic interfaces and discusses the mapping from events to syntax.Relevant studies have been done either on ditransitive construction or event structure,but few of them combine the two and discuss the issue with the support of authentic corpus data.Under such background,this study applies event structure theory to contrast the similarities and differences in the ditransitive constructions of the two languages of English and Chinese.This research applies Vendler’s four classifications of event types and Rappaport and Levin’s event structure templates for the analysis of the authentic data of ditransitive constructions retrieved from the English corpus--Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)and the Chinese corpus--BLCU Corpus Center(BCC).Through repeated analyses and comparison of the data collected from the above corpora of English and Chinese,the research has got the following findings:First,ditransitive constructions both in English and Chinese share the two event types of achievement and accomplishment,neither has a link to the event type of state,indicating that ditransitive constructions in English and Chinese share the characteristic of termination but has no relation to the characteristic of homogeny.Second,the event structures of all English ditransitive constructions are right-directed while Chinese ditransitive constructions have three representations:left-directed,right-directed,and two-way direction.With the above findings,this research has enriched the comparative studies of ditransitive constructions in what event types are shared by the two languages of English and Chinese and what is particular in each language,as well as the differences in the event structures of the two languages.The successful application of event structure theory to do the analyses can provide a new perspective to the study of ditransitive constructions.