A Construction Grammar Perspective To The Ditransitive Construction

As one of the most frequently used sentence patterns in various languages, the ditransitive construction is a hot issue in linguistics and has long been discussed by many scholars both at home and abroad. In my opinion, previous researches on the ditransitive construction generally fall into three main domains: the structural, the transformational, and the cognitive approach. However, none of them offer a satisfactory explanation, all of which have some drawbacks in interpreting the linguistic substance. Based on the Construction Grammar of Goldberg and the qualitative methodology, this thesis conducts a study on the ditransitive construction.According to the definition of construction in the book of Goldberg (1995), I hold that the ditransitive construction has its own syntactic pattern and constructional meaning. The ditransitive construction, as a category of form-meaning pairings, takes the syntactic form of VNN and conveys the prototypical sense of "agent successfully causes recipient to receive patient". Based on this view, the thesis presents the constructional representation of the ditransitive construction, and this is an innovation of the thesis. The ditransitive construction is a gestalt, which constraints its components and also absorbs meanings from them.Previous studies on the ditransitive construction from the perspective of Construction Grammar emphasize the interaction between the verbs and the construction and classify the ditransitive verbs according to different criteria. However, this thesis focuses on the interaction between the construction and its arguments: the construction itself inherently decides the selection of the arguments, whose properness influences the meaningfulness and acceptance of certain ditransitive expressions. For obvious semantic reasons, the prototypical agent and recipient is virtually always animate, and the prototypical patient shows a strong tendency to be inanimate and it should be a concrete touchable three-dimensional object which can be possessed by some person. Thanks to the metaphorical and metonymical mechanisms, the semantic properties of the arguments are extended: the agent and recipient also can be some inanimate entities; and the patient argument can also be an abstract entity such as a perception, a piece of information, an action, and so on. Based on the semantics of the ditransitive construction in which a cause-transfer meaning is embodied, which have been described in my figure the constructional representation of the ditransitive construction, I divide the relations among arguments into four types: the relation of actual transfer, the relation of potential transfer, the relation of denied transfer and the relation of reversed transfer around different types of "transfer". And this is another shining point of the thesis.