A Cognitive Study Of Polysemous Phenomenon Of English Ditransitive Construction

Ditransitive construction, as a very common phenomenon in languages, is a major concern that has drawn intellectual pursuit from different schools of linguists. It is a three-place argument pattern with a verb followed by two noun phrases. Ditransitive construction is one of the most productive constructions in English, whose syntactic property is NP V NP1 NP2 and which typically implies that the agent argument acts to cause transfer of an object to the recipient. According to construction grammar, the syntax and semantics of the ditransitive construction cannot be predicted from other constructions existing in the grammar and thus is viewed as an independent argument structure construction.From the perspective of the cognitive linguistics, this thesis adopts prototype category, metonymy and coercion theory to study the polysemous phenomenon of English ditransitive construction and probe into the motivation for the ditransitive as polysemous category. When lexical meaning of verbs and constructional meaning of the ditransitive are incompatible, both meanings will coerce each other to generate qualified ditransitive expressions. When the lexical meaning of verbs successfully coerces the constructional meaning, it will change the constructional meaning metonymically and cause the ditransitive construction to form a family of closely related polysemous category, among which 'actual successful transfer' is argued to be the prototype, i.e. the central sense of the category; other senses such as 'obligation of transfer', 'negation of transfer', 'intention of transfer', 'enablement of transfer' and 'future transfer' are viewed as the marginal members of the category and extended from the central constructional sense.Based on the study of the constructional polysemy of English ditransitive, this thesis proposes that lexical meaning of verbs determines to a certain extent the meaning of the construction which they enter and lexical meaning should be valued as far as the relation between the semantics of verbs and construction is concerned.