On Relations Of Ditransitive Construction And Verb In English And Chinese

Ditransitive construction is a common language phenomenon which has been widely concerned by researchers at home and abroad.At the beginning,ditransitive construction is one of the focus which has been discussed in Generative Grammar.The majority of researchers turn the research approach to the Construction Grammar with the development of cognitive grammar.And a few linguists explore the ditansitive construction within the theoretical frameworks of valency theory and construction grammar.The syntactic structure of ditransitive construction is two noun phrases followed by a verb,namely the structure of syntagmatic sequence[VN1N2].Its core meaning denotes that an agent causes an entity successfully move to the patient and consequently the patient possesses an entity.Therefore,there are three argument roles in the ditransitive construction:an agent,a theme and a patient.verbs.which enter into the ditransitive construction should correspond participant roles so asto be more compatible with the ditransitive construction.Therefore,the majority of ditransitive verbs are trivalent verbs which meaning refers to "give" meaning as well as that of ditransitive construction.However,in the corpus-based,there are semantic conflicts between the ditransitive construction and verbs.Based on the previous studies and related theories,this thesis collects the corpus about.ditransitive construction in English and Chinese.from British National Corpus(BNC),BLCU Corpus Center(BCC)and Center for Chinese Linguistic(CCL)to expounds the relation between the ditransitive construction and verbs through descriptive approach.This thesis mainly consists of six parts.The first part introduces the background of research,makes clear that the aim of research and puts forth three questions about this research:1.What is the relation between the ditransitive construction and verbs?2.Why do some bivalent verbs get into the ditransitive construction?3.Why does the asymmetry exist in the interaction?The second part presents previous studies about ditransitive construction both at home and abroad.It involves in the interpretation of term from English to Chinese;the syntactic pattern of ditransitive construction;constructional features;the classification of ditransitive verbs in English and Chinese;and relation of the ditransitive construction and verbs.According to the latter two parts,it seems that the verb "give"is taken to the central place and other ditransitive verbs should contain the meaning of"successfully transfer" in the English ditransitive construction.In Chinese ditransitive construction,the classification of verbs not only refers to the English ditransitive verb classification,but also bases on the direction of transferring.It claims that the meaning of verbs contains the negative transfer,the block transfer,and zero transfer.In the interaction between the ditransitive construction and verbs,a number of studies claim that the constructional meaning plays a predominant role.That is to say,the verbs can enter into the ditransitive construction which participant roles correspond with argument roles.While some advocates the dominance of verb meaning can decide the constructional argument structure.The third part is theoretical framework mainly includes construction grammar and valency theory to support this thesis.The fourth part presents the relation of ditransitive construction and verbs and the first and second questions.On the one hand,the compatibility between ditransitive construction and verbs in semantics indicates that the participant roles fuse with the argument roles,according to "Semantic Coherence Principle" and "Corre.spondence Principle" by Goldberg(1995).In addition,characterized with abstraction,the ditansitive construction can tolerate several verbs with implicit given meaning.On the other hand,verb's semantic structure has the effect on the meaning of ditransitive construction.Meanwhile,when the semantic conflict exists between verbs and the ditransitive construction,construction coercion or lexical coercion will takes effect.The present study,through analyzing English and Chinese ditransitive sentences,finds that the constructional meaning has the interactive relationship with the verb's meaning which means that both lexical coercion and construction coercion influence the generation of English ditransitive constructional meaning.In Chinese ditransitive construction,there are two kinds of verbs:give-type and take-type.Verbs in the former type do not have explicit given meaning under control of lexical coercion like bake,cook,build.Verbs in the latter type with explicit transferred meaning have one difference on the possessive object so that construction coercion takes effect.It seems that the interaction is asymmetric in these two languages.The fifth part gives the reason why the asymmetry exists in the interaction on the basis of the previous analysis.It is derived from the ontological feature of event participant,encyclopedic knowledge of language users and cultural distinction in different languages.Finally,the author draws a conclusion about the research and points out some limitations.According to this thesis,on the one hand,it might have a relative deep understanding about the ditransitive construction;on the other hand,it hopes to benefit the English teaching and translation.