The Construction Grammar Approach To The Ditransitive Construction

The ditransitive construction has long been much documented in linguistic research. For example, previous studies on it mainly fall into three main approaches: the structural approach, the transformational approach and the cognitive approach. However, all of them have some inadequacies. Based on the theory of CG from Goldberg, the thesis attempts to provide a more satisfactory explanation to the ditransitive construction.In the thesis, the ditransitive construction has its own syntactic structure: NP+V+NP1+NP2, and the meaning, which is"X cause Y to receive Z". Its arguments which have some constraints are also discussed. Due to the semantic reasons, the prototypical agent and recipient is always animate. Thanks to the metaphorical mechanism, the semantic properties of arguments are extended: the agent and recipient also can be inanimate entities. We find that there are some ditransitve verbs, such as"give", have the prototypical meaning of transfer, and some ditransitive verbs, such as"allow, leave", have the meaning of transfer, but not the prototypical meaning. And we classify those verbs which have not the prototypical meaning into five types. They are verbs of creation and obtaining, verbs of undertaking an obligation, verbs of future having and verbs of permission.The thesis pays special attention to the extensions of the ditransitive construction, which are licensed by metaphor. Prototypically, the direct object is a patient, a physical object, however, the object can be abstract or concrete noun phrase by metaphor, or in other words, the patient can be physical entities, abstract entities or entities related to speech. Basing on the classification of patient as metaphor, we can classify the noun phrases participated in as the patient into five types: information, fact/assumption, perception, action and exceptional one.In the thesis, according to the Goldberg's classification about the semantic of the ditransitive construction has cause-transfer meaning, the ditransitive construction is classified into four types: the type of actual transfer, the type of potential transfer, the type of denied transfer and the type of reversed transfer. The constructional representation of the ditransitive construction has been drawn to indicate the ditransitive construction has the meaning of transfer.