| Double Object Construction is one of the most common sentence patterns in human language, which has been attracting many researchers'attention. It is a common linguistic phenomenon that some caused-motion verbs can enter and be compatible with Double Object Construction, but some not. Previous studies on that phenomenon are mainly conducted from three perspectives, i.e., semantics, syntax and pragmatics, with each having its inadequacies.Construction Grammar put forward by Goldberg is a newly developing grammatical theory with great influence. Construction Grammar holds that the basic sense of a verb is fixed and its other senses are contributed by constructions; and that the interaction between the verb and the construction refers to the paradigmatic integration of the participant roles and argument roles. Compared with previous analytic methods, Goldberg's Construction Grammar is more powerful in explaining the different compatibility between Double Object Construction and caused-motion verbs. However, the theory overemphasizes that Double Object Construction coerces meanings of caused-motion verbs, and ignores the syntagmatic relations between the event entities represented by the verb and its two objects. Therefore, it doesn't give reasonable explanation to the phenomenon why some caused-motion verbs cannot occur in Double Object Construction. The current research proposes paying attention to the syntagmatic relations between the event entities represented by the verb and its two objects, and find cognitive motivation for the different compatibility between Double Object Construction and caused-motion verbs. Within the theoretic framework of Goldberg's Construction Grammar, this thesis attempts to discuss the different compatibility between Double Object Construction and caused-motion verbs from the perspective of cognition. In the light of Construction Grammar, the study analyses the cognitive motivation of the compatibility after setting two cognitive parameters for caused-motion verbs: goal orientation and theme orientation. Finally, it discusses the particular features of the five types of caused-motion verbs in their compatibility with Double Object Construction, based on the data from the corpus.The following conclusions may be drawn from our research: 1) two participant roles of caused-motion verbs in the semantic level, i.e., the patient and the goal, compete for the object slot. If the patient successfully competes for the object slot, the caused-motion verb will be compatible with Prepositional Construction; if the goal takes up the object slot, the caused-motion verb will be used in Double Object Construction; 2)the different compatibility between Double Object Construction and caused-motion verbs is cognitively motivated. The competition process between the patient and the goal is controlled by the comceptualizer. Whether a caused-motion verb can be compatible with Double Object Construction depends on what kind of cognitive orientation the conceptualizer assigns to it. The conceptualizer endows different cognitive orientation to different caused-motion verbs. When a caused-motion verb is assigned theme orientation, the patient successfully competes for the object position, which makes the caused-motion verbs compatible with Double Object Construction; when the verb is endowed with goal orientation by the conceptualizer, the recipient successfully takes up the place of the object, which makes the verb can be used in Double Object Construction; 3) there is a gradual continuum from incompatibility to compatibility for all the caused-motion verbs. Five kinds of caused-motion verbs takes up relatively steady positions in the continuum. However, the conceptualizer can change the cognitive orientation temporarily to make any verb compatible with DOC transitorily out of the requirement of the context. |
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