A Cognitive-Comparative Study Of Double Object Construction And Dative Construction In English

Double-object Construction and Dative Construction are very common in English, and the linguists pay much attention to its research. Structuralism gave the definitions of DOC and DC and analyzed their syntactic forms; generative grammar holds the view that DOC and DC can transform each other. However, with the development of cognitive linguistics, many scholars study them by means of construction grammar. And they discuss the features of the constructions, and make a comparative study on the differences of double-object construction in Chinese and English. However, there are few studies on the differences on the double-object construction and dative construction in English. On the basis of construction grammar and image-schema theory, the thesis studies the differences of the semantic attribute of arguments and semantic structure between double-object construction and dative construction and make a cognitive interpretation of the differencs.Construction Grammar believes that construction, as the basic unit in language, exists in each level of language. Construction itself has its own meaning, and the meaning of the construction and the lexical meaning interaction. Double-object construction and dative construction belongs to distrasitive construction, so there are some similarities of the semantic attribute of the argument in DOC and DC. In general, the agent in DOC and DC is a person-denoting noun with independent willpower, and the recipient is usually a life form. However, the patient is typically featured specific and substantial. The core meaning of double-object and dative construction is that "the action of agent causes the accusative (object or effect) transfer to the recipient". The semantics of these constructions is a related system whose basic meaning is that an object has been transferred successfully to the recipient, so the constructions are polysemy in semantics. However in English double-object construction the semantics of action direction or the schema of source-path-destination is highlighted, but the semantics of dynamic paradigm and the schema of connection are restricted. Therefore, the main verb chooses the recipient as the following element. Comparatively, in English dative construction,the semantics of dynamic paradigm or the schema of connection is highlighted, so the main verb chooses the patient as its following element.Thus it can be seen that further understanding the semantic differences and semantic attribute of arguments in English double-object construction and dative construction, we can understand the constructions better. What’s more, after the cognitive interpretation on the differences of the two constructions, we will have a comprehesive understanding of the constructions so that we can use them freely and properly.