Double Object Construction In Chinese And English: A Contrastive Study

The thesis attempts a systematic contrastive study of Chinese and English double object construction (DOC for short) from the perspective of case grammar theory. Different from the previous studies that mainly focus on syntactic features, this study selects a lot of DOC instances from the British National Corpus (mainly in chapter five) and other materials, of which the purpose is to provide empirical evidence for a detailed analysis of the structure.The study of the double object construction (S+V+N1+N2) has been a hot issue in modern linguistic study, and a lot of studies have been made on this language phenomenon. Previous studies mainly center on its structural or semantic classifications from the perspective of syntax.This thesis means to have an empirical study of various realizations of DOC in Chinese and English and its functions. The thesis claims that that there are more types of Chinese DOC than English DOC, and although "giving" is the typical function of DOC in English and Chinese, they are not totally the same in meaning and structure. For example, those "taking" meanings in English are always introduced by prepositions, which are regarded as case-markers. Even in those typical DOC expressing "giving", other than "beneficiary" cases, there are many other cases, like "experiencer, source" etc.Based on the study, I've found that there is almost no difference between Chinese and English DCO in meaning and structure. However, in atypical Chinese and English DOC, there are a lot of differences. Even in typical DOC having "giving" meanings, the semantic relationships are various, except "possessive relationship" there are "evaluation, instruction, a state of changes" etc. In addition, "event" is also used to explain semantic relationships of nouns in DOC.Based on the instances drawn from the BNC, I have found that various methods in realizations of DOC and its semantic relationships. The thesis provides a new approach to contrastive studies of this structure, and makes contribution to the further study of the structure.