A Constructional Approach To The Semantics Of Chinese Giving-Type Ditransitive Construction

Double-object structure, as a common pattern in Chinese, has been paid much attention to by Chinese linguistic scholars especially grammarians. Their explorations are often in the approaches of Structuralism, Generative Grammar, Valent Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics.This thesis, on the basis of a thorough review of the literature related to the structure, aims to explore the semantics of the Chinese giving-type ditransitive construction based on the Construction Grammar, when taking into consideration the difference of this structure in English and Chinese, especially the difference that there is a double-direction transfer in Chinese including the meaning of giving transfer and obtaining transfer. The obtaining-type is not taken into the present study. The author delimits the scope of the Chinese giving-type ditransitive construction with the syntactic form,"NP1+V+NP2+ NP3"and the semantic meaning,"the agent acts to cause the recipient to receive the patient".First, the author proves the existence of the Chinese giving-type ditransitive construction by its idiosyncratic syntactic structure as well as its unpredictable semantics. Since the construction bears the meaning of"giving transfer"on its own, which means that the construction is capable of contributing arguments, there is no need to posit implausible verb senses, when verbs with two participants occur in this construction.Second, the constructional polysemy is discussed. The sense,"actual successful giving transfer"is recognized as the central sense, thus the other classes of the meanings can be represented most economically as extensions from this sense. The extensional meanings include: (i) Agent acts to cause recipient to receive patient at some future point in time; (ii) Conditions of Satisfaction imply that agent causes recipient to receive patient.Metonymic and metaphorical extension of the prototypical construction is another issue related to the construction. Most metaphorical extensional instances are based on the central sense and have as their source domain this central sense. The semantic constraints on the agent, recipient and the patient in the prototype of the construction are often violated by metonymy and metaphor.This study provides a new perspective for the Chinese giving-type ditransitive construction research, and attempts to offer insights for more explanation in Chinese constructions with Construction Grammar.