English Ditransitive Complementation:a Corpus-Based Study

Ditransitive verbs and their complementation are common linguistic forms in language. With regard to the English ditransitive verbs, Quirk et al.(1985) gave the following definition:"Ditransitive verbs occur in type SVOO"(p.54). English ditransitive verbs and their constructions are important natural language phenomena and have been studied by scholars home and abroad from different perspectives.Based on Quirk et al.(1985), ditransitive constructions mainly have2basic structures:one has noun phrases as both the indirect object and the direct object, which is represented as VNjNa; the other is an object followed by a prepositional object, which is represented as VNPN. However, of all the English ditransitive verbs, some may take both of the2forms of VNN and VNPN in sentences; some may be used in only one of the2forms.On the basis of the2structures, English ditransitive verbs were classified into3patterns or categories:1) both V+N+N and V+N+P+N,2) V+N+N only, and3) V+N+P+N only. Based on the book A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (2005), and Mukherjee’s (2005) study on ditransitive verbs,5English ditransitive verbs were chosen as exemplars of each pattern:bring, give, offer, show, tell, for Pattern1; allow, charge, fine, refuse, wish, for Pattern2; and address, announce, communicate, explain, say, for Pattern3. The frequency of the target verbs were also checked by a verb list downloaded from the British National Corpus to guarantee that the chosen verbs have high frequency in real language use.Initially, every target verb was searched in the whole BNC. As there is no specific syntactic tag for the searching of ditransitive verbs in the BNC, the author had to search all the target verbs as lexical verbs in lemma query and manually selected tokens from the BNC which satisfied the condition of being ditransitive (VNN or VNPN). After collecting the data of each pattern, comparisons and contrasts were conducted in each pattern, aiming to find similarities and differences of the ditransitive verbs within and across patterns. Langacker’s usage-based model and complex prototype network were employed to explain and interpret the differences and similarities. In addition to the research into the whole BNC, the author also set up2subcorpora containing British spoken texts and British written texts in the BNC, and made a case study on give to find out the different uses of the word between the2sub-corpora.In the whole BNC, for each of the5verbs in Pattern1, over1000instances were observed, from which20tokens were chosen, either in the VNN or in the VNPN form. It was found that give was the most frequent ditransitive verb, and offer, bring, show and tell followed it in order, in frequency. In this pattern, the verb with its complementation usually suggests the motion of transfer (mostly of an entity) from the agent to the recipient (or beneficiary). In Pattern2and Pattern3, thousands of instances from the whole BNC were also observed for each of the target verbs. It was found that the target verbs were less frequently used in ditransitive constructions than those verbs in Pattern1. In addition, those verbs in Pattern2often suggested the sense of transferring a privilege from the agent to the recipient. In Pattern3, the verbs mainly involved the motion of transfer of massage. Furthermore, the deeper analysis of the word give in the2sub-corpora showed that give was more often used in the VNN form than in the VNPN form, in both the oral and the spoken sub-corpora. This result suggests that people are more interested in the patient than the recipient in using give this verb. The findings of the study highlight the potential of corpus-based research in assisting language learning and teaching. Meanwhile, the classification of ditransitive verbs based on the proposed patterns may also help teachers and learners to teach and study the usage of the English ditransitive verbs.