A Corpus-based Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of"Give"Ditransitive Construction

English Ditransitive Construction has been a hot issue in the field of linguistics home and abroad till present. Previous researches on English DC is mainly from the perspective of structural, transformational and cognitive approach. With the emergence of Construction Grammar put forward by Goldberg in the1990s, there arises a new perspective from which the study of English DC can be developed under the branch of cognitive approach. Based on the actual language materials in two corpora and under the theoretical framework of Goldberg’s CG, the study tries to reveal the similarities and differences in using "give" DC between FROWN and WECCL with the help of quantitative approach and qualitative analysis.This corpus-based comparative study tries to answer three questions:(1) Are there similarities or differences in the use of "give" DC between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers?(2) What are the similarities and differences in the three arguments of "give" DC, namely agent, recipient and patient? For the patient argument, how many types of words are employed in FROWN and WECCL? Which words are not used by Chinese EFL learners? What is the preference of patients chosen by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers in the use of "give" DC?(3) What are the causes of similarities and differences in the use of "give" DC?The file in both WECCL and FROWN are saved in the form of TXT and hence we can use the Key Word in Context concordance function of AntConc3.2.4to get the corpus needed. Search all forms of the verb "give"(including give, gives, giving, gave, given) one by one in WECCL and FROWN, and then manually select the "give" ditransitive construction from all the sentences containing forms of the verb "give" provided by both corpora to get the materials needed.After investigating the situation of using "give" DC in FROWN and WECCL, the study has achieved following results:(1) Chinese EFL learners have a tendency to use less human agents and more non-human agents compared with the use of "give" DC by native speakers. And Chinese EFL learners prefer non-human agents to human agents,which is quite different from native speakers who display a relative balanced use of human and non-human agents. This difference in using agent arguments may reveal the insufficiency of Chinese EFL learners in the mastering of "give" DC, which mostly caused by the transfer of mother tongue.(2) Both Chinese EFL learners and native speakers perform a stronger tendency of using human recipients rather than non-human recipients. The similarity of the two situations illustrates the better grasp of recipient arguments by Chinese EFL learners.(3) Native speakers use more types of patients than EFL Chinese learners. The patients used in FROWN are more diversified than those in WECCL, which reveals Chinese learners’lack of flexibility in the application of different patients. The causes of this phenomenon may be their smaller vocabulary compared with native speakers, or the lack of proficiency in using this construction. Native speakers and Chinese EFL learners more frequently use non-physical objects as patients.The whole study cannot be without any weak points and avoid some deficiencies for several factors which have great influence on this study. The study has following limitations. First, as the foundation of the whole study, two corpora play a very important role. The two corpora employed in this study was constructed in different time, so the results achieved by the comparison between those two corpora have the possibility to be different if the data collected by the two corpora is at least at the close time line. Second, all materials used in this study collected from the two corpora are in a small number, which means the results achieved need to be further proved and the scale of the study have to be expanded. The categories of non-physical objects used as patients are on the basis of previous similar researches and combined with the writer’s grammatical intuition, which are subjective to some extent.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter gives a general introduction to the study, elaborates its objectives and significance. The second chapter is the part of literature review which gives an analysis to previous research on English DC and introduces the theoretical framework of the study and especially concludes the previous study on English "give" DC and points out the originality as well. The third chapter is the part of research design, which presents research questions, data collection and the procedures of analysis. The fourth chapter is the part of results and discussions, which gives answers to research questions, and tries to figure out the causes of those results. The last chapter is the conclusion of major findings, implications and limitations of the study, and suggestions for future research as well.