Corpus-based Collostructional Analysis Of The Mandarin Ditransitive Construction

The mandarin ditransitive construction is a heated topic discussed by linguists. The issue under investigation ranges from the definition of the ditransitive construction, the constraints on verbs in the ditransitive construction, the classification of the ditransitive construction to the prototypical sense and the basic syntactic form of the ditransitive construction. There is never a consensus. At present, most research relies on intuitional retrospection and literature research. Quantitative approaches are seldom adopted to research the construction.The collostruction strength is posited by Stefanowitsch&Gries (2003) to measure the degree of attraction of a given word to a given construction. The stronger the collostruction strength is, the more likely the word is prototypical. In order to reach a consensus on these controversial issues about the Chinese ditransitive construction, we will adopt this method here to measure the association of words and the mandarin ditransitive construction associated with them. It is concluded that the prototypical sense of the mandarin ditransitive construction is "GEI (give)", and there are four basic syntactic forms of the mandarin ditransitive construction, among which VNP1NP2is the most prototypical one. Other senses and forms co-exist with the prototypical ones and develop along the different dimension of semantic specialization. The specialization of the semantics motivates the extension of the syntactic form of the mandarin ditransitive construction, and in reverse. With the specialization of semantics, other variants of the mandarin ditransitive construction are more productive than the prototypical one. The reason underlying is that Chinese relies much more on the word order.