The Acquisition Of Ditransitive Construction From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

Under construction grammar, Goldberg defines ditransitive construction as being associated directly with conceptional structure agent, patient and recipient roles, which can be expressed as the grammatical structure "subject v objectl & object2" Subject maps with agent. Objectl maps with patient. Object2 maps with recipient. Central sense of ditransitive construction involves transfer between a volitional agent and a willing recipient.Based on construction grammar, ditransitive construction can be regarded as a construction in that the constuction itself encodes the semantics of giving transfer, independently of the constituent parts, especially the meaning of the verb. The meaning of obtaining transfer of some other instances is the extensional sense of the central sense of giving transfer by metonymy.The constructions are capable of contributing arguments, not the requirement of the verbs. It is the constructions that attribute novel meaning to the verb, not vice versa. Therefore, in this study, we proposed that acquisition of ditransitive construction sense in second language teaching and learning by Chinese EFL learners. Three key questions were investigated:(1) Is acquisition of ditransitive construction good for students to accept ditransitive sentences which are not easy to understand before?(2) Is teaching and acquisition of ditransitive construction sense helpful for students to construe the prototypical sense of ditransitive sentences when predicate verbs are new in those sentences in reading practices?(3) After students have learnt interaction between ditransitive construction and verbs, could they solve problems of valence of verbs?In order to address the above questions, three tests were designed and conducted. Test one was a grammatical judgement on 5 ditransitive sentences. In test two, we mainly test subjects' comprehension about 20 ditransitive sentences and their construal ability about ditransitive verbs. Test three is based on test one. Test three aims to find out that whether these subjects could settle down the problem of valence of verb since they have learnt interaction between ditransitive construction and verbs in it. Two groups of subjects from NO.1 senior middle school of Rencheng county were recruited in the study. All the data were analysed through Excel. The results showed:(1) Control group shows that they have difficulty in acquiring ditransitive construction. Subjects of experimental group did well in test one after they have learnt whole sense of ditransitive construction. Compared with pre-test, their performance achieved a lot. This phenomenon implies the feasibility of teaching ditransitive construction in actual second language teaching and learning. We can conclude that it is very necessary for teachers to teach students ditransitive constructions.(2) Subjects of experimental group did better in construing predicate verbs'meaning when they realized the integreting relationship between verbs and constructions.(3) Subjects of control group can not handle valence change of familiar predicate verbs. Language sense, guessing and past knowledge about transitive verbs are not enough for them to settle the problem down. We can find that integrating relationship between verbs and constructions provides one simple and feasible method for teachers.Besides, the empirical results also have some implications for the second language teaching and learning. Firstly, in actual teaching process, teachers should weaken usage of the traditional way of distinguishing and teaching different structures. What they should do is to stress the grasp of the overall meaning. Besides, in actual teaching course, different level of language learners should be considered. Then proper teaching strategies could be made. In addition, by recognizing the existence of meaningful construction, the learners can avoid the claim that the syntax and semantics is projected merely from the specifications of the main verb and other components. They can also avoid positing the implausible sense to account for difficult sentences.