A Cognitive Study Of English And Chinese Ditransitive Constructions

Ditransitive construction ((NP1)VNP2NP3), as a widespread phenomenon in natural language, has attracted lots of academic attention. Almost all linguistic schools which have an impact on linguistic study choose it as a researching focus. Although so many experts and scholars have explored this issue from different angles and achieved series of achievements, there are still many inadequacies. Structural linguists have tried their best to make a concrete description and classification of ditransitive construction, but what they did is far from ideal. The Transformation Generative approach pays more attention to the so-called dative shift and the role the verb plays, leaving the difference between ditransitive construction and dative construction and the semantics of the whole construction untouched. The study conducted by cognitive linguists is still at the initial stage and both the description and explanation can be furthered. This thesis, based on construction grammar and some related cognitive theories, aims to make a contrastive study of the ditransitive constructions in English and Chinese and try to find the motivations to the discrepancies and similarities between English and Chinese ditransitive constructions.Construction grammar holds that simple clause constructions are associated directly with semantic structures which reflect scenes basic to human experience. Language form is inseparable from its meaning and function. All levels of grammatical analysis involve constructions, the basic units of language. A construction can be constituted by many other constructions. It has a kind of meaning which is not a simple sum total of the meaning of its constituent elements. Construction and verbs interact with each other. The central meaning of the construction is typically associated with a family of closely related senses rather than a single, fixed abstract meaning.The thesis, based on the achievements already made and by using data from corpus, makes a contrastive study of English ditransitive construction and its Chinese counterpart from five aspects, namely, the extension of arguments, ditransitive verbs, directional meaning of the construction, prototypical meaning of the construction and constructional ambiguity. Through comparison, we find that there are lots of similarities between English ditransitive construction and its Chinese counterpart, which are mainly expressed in the construction form, basic construction meaning, prototypes of arguments and extension mechanisms etc. but differences are also obvious, which are mainly expressed in the scope of extension, non-prototypical verbs, the directional meaning of the construction, ambiguity, etc.The thesis provides a unified explanation of the differences and similarities from three aspects, namely, regularities of the objective world, cognitive abilities and language system. Regularities of the objective world are the basis of a language system; cognitive abilities are the media or bridge of shaping a language system; and language system, once formed, will play a huge reactive role, which restricts our cognitive ability of understanding the objective world. Since the English and Chinese people possess similar cognitive abilities, face the similar objective world and are engaged in similar events, the language structure, as the human's reflection of the regularities of the objective world, will certainly show similarities. Meantime, even though we have similar cognitive abilities and face similar environment, yet the phenomenon that the objective world is colorfully presented before our eyes and the different perspective that people choose to construe events determines that our construal of the objective world will not be exactly the same. This leads to the differences between English and Chinese ditransitive constructions. In addition, the language system strictly restricts its own structures.