A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Ditransitive Constructions From The Perspective Of Linguistic Typology

Ditransitive constructions are ubiquitous in languages.As a typical argument construction,a ditransitive construction contains a trivalent verb typically carrying the agent,the recipient and the theme.It mainly includes double object construction and dative construction.This thesis,based on some previous studies,conducts a contrastive research on the linear orders and grammatical hierarchies of English and Chinese ditransitive constructions from the perspective of linguistic typology.It adopts the corpus-based method for the comparative investigation of ditransitive constructions.After that,this thesis interprets the typological characteristics of English and Chinese ditransitive constructions from the angle of the linguistic adaptation theory and the prototype theory.Except for English and Chinese,the languages used in this thesis include seventy-five languages,which can be classified as SVO languages,SOV languages and VSO languages.This thesis,taking “lend” and “jie(?)” as examples,systematically compares and analyzes English and Chinese ditransitive constructions and tries to find out their typological characteristics.Firstly,this thesis reviews the previous researches on ditransitive constructions both at home and abroad.Many foreign and domestic linguists have given much attention to ditransitive constructions,but they are mostly committed to the studies from the approach of structuralism,generative grammar,cognitive linguistics etc.In recent years,with the vigorous development of linguistic typology,experts and scholars have begun to examine ditransitive constructions from the perspective of linguistic typology.Scholars have made many meaningful achievements and reached much essential consensus about ditransitive constructions.However,there is still some space for further studies.Secondly,this thesis makes a contrastive study on the linear orders and grammatical hierarchies of ditransitive constructions from the angle of linguistic typology.It takes “lend” and “jie” as examples for the study of English and Chinese ditransitive constructions,which are collected from domestic and foreign corpora,like COCA.At the same time,this thesis also analyzes examples of ditransitive constructions in SVO languages,SOV languages and VSO languages under the help of WALS,ethnographic books and so forth.In terms of the linear orders,it takes the ditransitive verb,the recipient and the theme as parameters.While,as for the grammatical hierarchies,it takes animacy,definiteness,and person of the agent,the recipient and the theme as references to examine their universals and differences.Based on the theory of the linguistic typology and corpus-based method,through cross-linguistic comparison,this thesis comes up to the following conclusions: 1)There are three similar linear orders in English and Chinese ditransitive constructions,that is,VRT,VTR and TVR,but English ditransitive constructions have the linear order of RVT.2)If the dominant order of the predicate and the object in a language is pre-verbal,the dominant order of the verb,the recipient,and the theme is also pre-verbal.3)As far as the person in the ditransitive construction is concerned,the recipient is more liable to be a personal pronoun than the agent and the theme.4)The agent and the recipient of ditransitive constructions are mostly definite and in high animacy,and the person is always in the first-person and the third-person form.5)The theme is usually in low animacy,and the frequency of the inanimate theme is higher than the animal theme.The person of the theme is universally the third person.Finally,this thesis interprets the typological characteristics of English and Chinese ditransitive constructions under the guidance of the linguistic adaptation theory and the prototype theory.According to the linguistic adaptation theory,the typological characteristics of linear orders in English and Chinese ditransitive constructions are the result of language users' systematic adaptation to context,linguistic structure,dynamic process and conscious salience.In the case of English and Chinese ditransitive constructions,the contextual adaptation mainly refers to the adaptation to the psychological world and the social world.The typological characteristics of English and Chinese ditransitive constructions result from the adaptation to a series of complex factors and principles.From the perspective of the prototype theory,the typological characteristics of the grammatical hierarchies in English and Chinese ditransitive constructions are influenced by family resemblance,and the more family resemblances the category members maintain,the higher the degree of grammatical hierarchies they possess and the higher the frequency is.This thesis starts with the discussion of typological characteristics of English and Chinese ditransitive constructions,and then further investigates the characteristics of ditransitive constructions in other seventy-five languages.Their major findings provide us with some cross-linguistic evidences for the similarities and differences of English and Chinese ditransitive constructions and supply supplementary materials for the study of linguistic typology.Meanwhile,it can help language learners and users to understand more about the typological properties of ditransitive constructions,and then to make more proper use of ditransitive constructions.