On The Double Object Construction In English And Chinese

The Double-Object Construction(DOC)has always been a hot topic among the linguistic field at home and abroad.Recently,the emergence and prosperity of Construction Grammar has offered us a brand new perspective on the issue.In her 1995 monograph,Goldberg,one of the main representatives,made a comprehensive study on the characteristics of English DOC and argued that its central sense is 'agent successfully causes recipient to receive patient',from which the other five classes of meanings and most metaphorical extensions are based on.In such a context,many researchers in Chinese like Zhang Bojiang,Xu Shenghuan,Shi Yuzhi and Zhang Jianli,have all introduced the concept of Construction in their study of the DOC in English or Chinese and new insights have been captured indeed.However,the previous studies,as I have noticed,are limited in seeking for the underlying causes for the differences between English and Chinese DOC,and conflicts remain on certain issues.On the basis of former studies,adopting a constructional approach as well as incorporating other Chinese and cognitive theories,this thesis continues to carry out a contrastive study and attempts to clarify the distinctions between English and Chinese DOC.In light of synchronic facts,a diachronic investigation is particularly conducted here,tracing the origin,growth and change of the DOC both in English and Chinese over various periods of time and at various historical stages.Meanwhile,the impact of the two language systems on the construction is developed.It is concluded that:1.The English DOC semantically incorporates GIVING in its formation.The Chinese DOC,since ancient times,has been used to express a variety of semantic types including GIVING and TAKING.The two are argued to be applications of the Concept Realization Principle,but have different motivations and operational mechanisms.The former is the basic structure for the act of 'giving',and the latter is formed to put emphasis on the maleficiary role of the indirect object.The disyllabification tendency and the subsequent emergency of resultative construction as well as the requirement of semantic completion combine to restrict some verbs from modern Chinese DOC and explains the phenomenon that the character '给' is expected to be added to some verbs like '递,寄,传,抛,丢,捅' when they form the double object sentences.2.The English is a case-marking language and Chinese is a non-case-marking language.This helps account for the difference between the English and Chinese DOC.In English,the NPs should correspond to the argument roles of the DOC and the constructional meaning wilt exert coercional force on verbs with it.In Chinese, however,the DOC only supplies a frame with three arguments that can be filled by a variety of NPs and its constructional force is far weaker than that of English.In closing,it is proposed that the construction and its verbs form a relation of dynamic counterpoise:the stronger the verbs' senses,the weaker the constructional force,like the Chinese DOC;the stronger the constructional force,the weaker the verbs' senses, as represented by the English DOC.The cross-linguistic study shows that the language facts in Chinese are much more diverse than that in English and Construction Grammar offers us new perspectives in the study of Chinese syntax.The different behavior of DOC in English and Chinese is within the expectation of Construction Grammar.