ABC Study Of The English Dative Construction

The ditransitive construction is a ubiquitous phenomenon which has two syntactic patterns: the Double Noun Construction (VN1N2) and the Dative Construction (VN1pN2), with giving/transfer as its central sense. Scholars from the structural, functional, transformational and cognitive schools have made a lot of descriptions and analyses concerning this issue. But the previous researches mainly focus on the typical structure of VN1pN2 with the prepositions to, with, for, and neglect other prepositions. Moreover, the monographic study on the English dative construction supported by the theoretical framework and the closed corpus has rarely been seen.This thesis proposes the Bidirectional Coercion (BC for short) integrating the related theories of Construction Coercion and Lexical Coercion to conduct a research on the semantic explanation of the dative construction in the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG). 980 verbs which are marked as VP18 (VN1pN2) are exhaustively collected from the Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English with Chinese Translation (ALD, 1970). Among them, 204 verbs marked as VP18 and VP10 (the pN2 is used as the Adverbial) will be excluded from the corpus. Thus altogether 776 verbs and 1014 instantiations (some verbs can be collocated with more than one preposition) will be taken to establish a closed corpus. This research will be conducted on the basis of BC with the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the closed corpus.This thesis consists of five chapters including the introduction and the conclusion.Chapter One"Introduction"provides a general introduction for this study, consisting of motivation, purpose, methodology and data collection as well as the layout.Chapter Two"Literature Review"reviews the previous researches on the English dative construction made by different linguistic schools from different perspectives, and also finds the gap in the previous studies.Chapter Three"Theoretical Basis"presents the theoretical framework of BC on the basis of Construction Coercion and Lexical Coercion to bridge the gap for the study of the dative construction.BC refers to Bidirectional Coercion between the construction and the lexicon. In the dative construction, if its constructional meaning rightward giving process is compatible with the verbs, zero coercion takes place (25%); when they are incompatible, the constructional meaning can coerce the verbs into changing their meanings and construction coercion takes place; the lexical items also can coerce the constructional meaning into making some adjustments and thus the lexical coercion takes place. Construction Coercion and Lexical Coercion both can act on the semantic explaination for the dative construction, as is shown from the following figure:Chapter Four"Data Statistics, Analysis and Discussion"concerns the data description, distribution, analysis and discussion. BC is applied to the analysis of the semantic features of the dative construction (VN1pN2) with the data statistics.According to the semantic definitions of the 776 verbs in the dictionary entry and the pentapartite division of the ditransitive verbs proposed by Professor Wang Yin (2009, 2011), 776 verbs in the corpus can be classified into five types: + giving (194),↓giving (134), 0 giving (330),×giving (94) and– giving (24). The result of Bidirectional Coercion in English dative construction is shown in the table on next page. Chapter Five"Conclusion"deals with the conclusion and the main findings of the study:1) This thesis proposes Bidirectional Coercion (BC) to make up for the deficiency that CxG has overstated construction coercion ignoring the influence from the lexical items, and realizes the combination of the top-down analysis and bottom-up analysis together.2) This paper has exhaustively collected 980 verbs used in the dative construction from ALD (1970) and has found that 204 verbs among them can also be used in VP10 (the pN2 used as the Adverbial). 776 verbs has been taken for the closed corpus to conduct the research with the qualitative and quantitative analysis, which will further the previous studies on the ditransitive construction.This paper unifies the theoretical perspective to the coercion and finds that in the closed corpus, verbs of +giving type which are compatible with the constructional meaning are zero coercion that covers 25%; the coercion including construction coercion (59.8%) and lexical coercion (15.2%) makes up 75.0%, shown as follows:3) There are 25 prepositions that can be used in the dative construction. Among them, the four top-frequency ones are to, with, from, for, as is shown in the following table:This chapter also points out limitations of this paper and proposes suggestions for its further research.