A Corpus-based Analysis Of "GIVE/GEI" Ditransitive Construction Usage In English And Chinese

Recent years have seen increasing numbers of investigation on Ditranstive Construction which consist general in English and Chinese as a usual construction.Research on DC is mainly carried out from the perspective of structuralism,formalism,functionalism and cognitive approach.With the emergence and development of Construction Grammar,a novel perspective can be applied to further explore such construction.Under the guidance of the CG theory,the corpus-based quantitative approach combined is adopted here to investigate the usage of give/gei-DC in English and Chinese in real data.In view of CG theory as a usage-based approach,this study retrievals online data from the comparable corpora,namely CROWN and TORCH2009,manually ruling out the non-ditranstive construction,then contrastively analyze separate frequency and percentage of English and Chinese give/gei-DC,in order to address issues in similarities and differences in English and Chinese give/gei-DC and offer the reliable cognitive reasons for the metaphorical and metonymical mechanism.On the process of the literature review and data analysis,this study mainly focuses on three questions:(1)What are the overall features of the usage of English and Chinese give/gei-DC in both corpora?(2)What are the features of the three arguments of the give/gei-DC,the agent,the recipient and the patient?(3)What are the reasons of the extension of both English and Chinese give/gei-DC?As an empirical study on basis of Goldberg Construction Grammar,we carry out quantitative approach combined with qualitative analysis to make a survey of frequency of English and Chinese give/gei ditransitive constructions in CROWN and TORCH2009 separately and finally arrive at the following conclusions: English give-DC has a obviously stronger tendency than Chinese gei-DC under the account of the data due to diversity of Chinese sentence structures and the features of centering on logic and syntax in English sentences.With regard to agent and recipient arguments,English give-DC has rather extent to use human agent(subject)and recipient(indirect object),however the gap is small.Contrast to English,Chinese �gei-DC� manifests higher usage of the nonhuman agent argument than human agent,yet the discrepancy is not overt.However,human recipients take over overwhelmingly dominant position.Both English give-DC and Chinese �gei-DC� has a higher tendency to make use of abstract nouns than three-dimensional physical concrete objects as the patient argument.Besides,English give-DC accounts for less in passive voice compared with none passive voice sentences in Chinese �gei-DC�.Under the metaphorical and metonymical mechanism,differences in lexix and grammar between English and Chinese lead to the unbalanced usage in the extension of the prototype structure.Besides,this study is an empirical research in light of construction grammar,and offers some new angles and thoughts on the language acquisition(especially in children language acquisition and second language acquisition),foreign language teaching and English-Chinese translation.Meanwhile,the single objective of this study focuses on the tiny give/gei-DC and the overwhelming characteristics involved may have been overlooked.Besides,due to the limitation of the small scale of the CROWN corpus and the TORCH2009 corpus,there are still many results on usage of give/gei-DC remaining to be tested in order to confirm the reliability and the accuracy,though the data in both corpora are latest and real.