The Acquisition Of English Ditransitive Construction By Chinese EFL Learners

Ditransitive construction is associated directly with agent,patient and recipient roles,which can be expressed as the syntactic configuration NP1 + V + NP2 + NP3.However,as a gestalt,the ditransitive construction does not constrain these components but absorbs meanings from them.The prototypical English ditransitive construction should have the following properties:(1) The agent is expected to be volitional,animate and should have a patient before the transfer occurs.(2) The patient tends to be inanimate, three-dimensional,transferable and physical;and(3) the recipient tends to be volitional,animate and comes into possession of the patient after the transfer finished.According to CG,the sense of a clause should be the integration of construction and verbs,and the prototypical sense of the ditransitive construction is volitional giving or transfer.Therefore,in this study,we proposed that the meaning of ditransitive verbs is the core which determines the meaning of ditransitive construction and categorized it into three kinds:overt-giving,covert-giving and non-giving.To investigate the acquisition of ditransitive construction by EFL learners, three key research questions were investigated: (1).Do the three types of ditransitive verbs in ditransitive construction pose the same degree of difficulties to the learners?(2).Would the Chinese EFL learners prefer to choose ditransitive construction or dative construction when the similar "giving" meaning is expressed?(3).Will the L2 learners' knowledge of the target pattern develop alongside with the progress of their general language competence?In order to address the above questions,two tasks were designed and conducted.Task One was a grammatical judgment and Task Two required the participants to answer the 15 multiple-choice questions.Three groups of participants from three L2 proficiency levels were recruited in the study.The beginning level group consisted of 30 sophomores from accounting class in Guizhou Finance and Economy College.The intermediate group was composed of 30 third-year English major students and the advanced group had 30 students of English master program.Both the intermediate and the advanced groups were from Guizhou Normal University.Besides the performance of judgment and choice tasks,all the participants were asked to write their judgment reasons which provided more evidence to answer our research questions.All the data were analyzed through SPSS 13.0.The results showed:(1).The subjects' mean score differences among the three types of ditransitive verbs were highly significant.The type of non-giving verb is the most difficult to acquire,the easiest is the covert-giving verb and the intermediate is overt-giving.For Chinese EFL learners the degree of difficulty of acquisition increases from covert-giving,overt-giving to non-giving.(2).Comparing with the ditransitive construction,there is a tendency for Chinese EFL learners to use the dative construction more to express "giving" meaning.(3).In general,the learners' performance on the ditransitive construction develops alongside with their general language proficiency. As the learners' general competence improved,it Would be easier for them to learn the ditransitive construction with non-giving verbs.While for those with overt-giving verbs and non-giving verbs there is no significant difference between the beginning group and the intermediate group.Besides,the empirical results also have some implications for the teaching and learning of English ditransitive construction.Firstly, teachers can inform students that the prototypical constructional meaning of the ditransitive construction is X CAUSE Y TO RECEIVE Z and-any ditransitive expression is an instance of this construction.The meaning of ditransitive construction integrates the constructional sense with the meaning of its components.It is unnecessary for teachers to emphasize the traditional categories,such as subject,predicate,indirect object or direct object,because the latter way of explanation does not help students much.Secondly,recognizing the existence of meaningful construction, the learners can avoid the claim that the syntax and semantics are projected merely from the specifications of the main verb and other components.Lastly,knowing the transformational constraints of ditransitive construction and dative construction can help the students to master the usage of the two constructions correctly and avoid over generalization.