A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On English And Chinese Giving-type Ditransitive Constructions

There is a rising tide of interest in DC in the linguistic circle home and abroad. Research on DCs is mainly carried out from the perspective of structuralism, formalism and cognitive approach. The previous studies enable us to further construe such a construction. In the1990s, however, the emergence of Construction Grammar provides a novel perspective on the study of DCs in cognitive way. The corpus-based quantitative approach combined with qualitative analysis under the guidance of the CG theory is adopted here to unearth how English giving-type DC differs from its Chinese counterpart in the corpora.As an empirical study, this research employs the comparable corpora, namely FROWN and LCMC as a source of real language materials, makes a statistic analysis of both English and Chinese giving-type DCs in the corpora, ultimately presents the results in the form of frequency, percentage and Pearson Chi-Square value which can test and verify the reliability and explanatory power of the CG theory by attempting to unearth the similarities and differences between the giving-type DCs in English and Chinese.This corpus-based study attempts to address two questions:(1) What are the overall features of the use of English and Chinese giving-type DCs in the corpora?(2) Are giving-type DCs in English and Chinese symmetric in extensional mechanism? If not, what are the causes of the dissymmetry of the extension of both English and Chinese giving-type DCs within the theoretical framework of Goldberg’s CG?Antconc is selected as the concordancer software for the FROWN corpus while the online data retrieval mode is adopted for Chinese data. By manually ruling out the non-ditransitive constructions, we can carry out a survey of frequency of English and Chinese giving-type ditransitive verbs in FROWN and LCMC separately and utimately arrive at the following conclusions:(1) Compared with English, Chinese has a relatively lower tendency to use giving-type DC due to the Chinese language’s higher degree of syntactic diversity."Give" and "给" are frequently used in expressing the meaning of the giving-type DC in both English and Chinese. Besides, both English and Chinese giving-type DCs tend to use verbs that inherently signify acts of giving and verbs of communicated message most frequently. Different from English giving-type DC that tends to use the other two subcategories of (+) prototypical giving-type DC with positive direction least frequently, Chinese giving-type DC tends to use (↓) potential transferring ditransitive verbs least frequently. With regard to agent and recipient arguments, both English and Chinese giving-type DCs have a stronger tendency to use human agents/recipients than nonhuman agents/recipients, but the difference between the two corpora is marked in the distribution of human and nonhuman agents and unmarked in the distribution of human and nonhuman recipients. Human agents are used more often as subject argument in English than in Chinese. As far as the use of the patient argument is concerned, both tend to use more abstract nouns than three-dimensional physical concrete objects as the patient argument. However, there is marked difference between the two corpora in the distribution of three-dimensional physical concrete objects and abstract nouns. Abstract nouns are used more often as patient argument in English than in Chinese. In addition, English "give" DC tends to use "give" DC with typical NP1, NP2and atypical NP3the most frequently with regard to the sequence of English "give" DC with typical or atypical participants in the corpora while Chinese "gei" DC tends to use "gei" DC with atypical NP1, NP3and typical NP2the most frequently.(2) Research question two shows that giving-type DCs in English and Chinese are assymmetric in extensional mechanism due to the differences of lexicalization and grammaticalization in the two languages.This thesis is unavoidably subject to some deficiencies due to the complexity of the features of the giving-type DC. The first limitation is that the conclusions drawn from the corpus-based data in this thesis are far from exhaustive and may have overlooked some characteristics involved; Second, both the FROWN corpus and the LCMC corpus represent the languages of the early1990s. This thesis merely makes a research into the English and Chinese languages of the early1990s without considering the latest usage of the two languages; Besides, this research merely takes into account the giving-type DCs in English and Chinese and the data is obtained from a relatively small-scale comparable corpora, therefore much work remains to be done to confirm the results and to expand upon them.