A Contrastive Study On The Cognitive Features Of English And Chinese Ditransitive Verbs

Both English and Chinese Ditransitive Verbs(abbreviated as Ditr-Vs in this paper)change when they appear in Ditransitive Construction(abbreviated as Ditr-C).Some verbs seem to have acquired the ability to express the meaning of giving or taking when they are in Ditr-C,and some verbs seem to have changed their directional meaning from giving,taking,or neutral to taking,giving,or both of giving and taking.Although many scholars have studied Ditr-Vs,they did not concentrate much attention on doing a cross linguistic study on the changes mentioned above.The present paper,guided by Goldberg?s Construction Grammar,and based upon self-built database,intends to carry out a contrastive study on the process of English and Chinese Ditr-Vs? integration with Ditr-C,as well as on Ditr-Vs? changes when they appear in Ditr-C,so as to come closer to the similarities and differences of the two languages.This paper discomposes English and Chinese Ditr-C into two sub-constructions: the Ditr-C which implies a cause-receive event,and the variant Ditr-C which implies a cause-lose event.And studies the 62 English and 186 Chinese Ditr-Vs which are selected from the Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU and the British National Corpus,from three aspects including the event types the verbs represent,the participant roles of the verb event,and the ways the verbs integrate with the constructions.This kind of discomposure and way of study is based on Goldberg?s opinion about construction.Goldberg states that construction is generalization of human beings? everyday life in the physical world represented in human language.It is a kind of linguistic form,as well as a description of a specific kind of event in the human world.In a word,it is a pair of form and function.Moreover,a construction has a meaning that is not the total sum of its component parts?,and is not strictly predictable from its component parts.It is the kind of meaning unique to the construction,which means different constructions have different forms and different functions.Goldberg also agrees that fusion of the participant roles of a verb event with argument roles of a construction is indispensible if the verb is going to appear in the construction.Findings of this paper contain four parts.First,Chinese Ditr-Vs overwhelms English Ditr-Vs in the verb categories,which is to say,the Chinese ones cover more categories than the English ones do.Second,Ditr-C has the same kind of influences on both the English and Chinese Ditr-Vs,but each of the influences affects differently on verbs of the two languages.Third,neither English nor Chinese Ditr-Vs obtain the meaning of giving or taking,even when they are parts of the instances of Ditr-C.Fourth,English Ditr-Vs are more likely to change their directional meaning under the pressure of Ditr-C than the Chinese ones do.