| There are two constructions of Dative Alternation in English: double object construction and prepositional dative construction.Both constructions contain three arguments: agent,theme,and recipient.Early linguists did a lot of theoretical research on Dative Alternation.These studies discussed the lexical meaning,syntactic structure,semantic concept,pragmatics and generative mechanism of Dative Alternation.However,these theories only study Dative Alternation at a single level and fail to fully explore the interaction between semantic and pragmatic factors of structure.In recent years,with the development of corpus,linguistics can combine mathematical models to analyze real corpus.Linguists have found many factors that influence the Dative Alternation such as the animacy,concreteness,definiteness,pronominality of the arguments and so on.These factors can affect the choice of the two constructions.This finding contradicts the traditional practice of simplifying the two constructions into two forms with the same meaning in teaching.In order to study the actual use of Dative Alternation,based on construction grammar,this paper selects the corpus of contemporary American English and the Chinese leaner English corpus.Taking “give” as an example,this paper selects the animacy,concreteness,definiteness,pronominality of the theme and recipient as the independent variables to investigate whether there are differences between English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners in the use of the two constructions and in the property of arguments.In view of the differences in the level of Chinese English learners,Chinese leaner English corpus includes students of different English level,which is convenient for analysis and comparison in this paper.Based on the binary logistic regression model,all the corpus is modeled to analyze the effects of each factor.There are three main research questions of this paper:1.What is the frequency of double object construction and prepositional dative construction in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Chinese Leaner English Corpus? And how is the difference between English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners in the use of the two constructions?2.What are the characteristics of the theme and recipient in double object construction and prepositional dative construction by the students of different English proficiency levels?3.What are the characteristics of the factors influencing Dative Alternation choice in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Chinese Leaner English Corpus?The results of this paper reveal that:1.In general,both English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners tend to use double object construction,and there is no significant difference in the selection tendency of the two Dative Alternation constructions between English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners.However,the proportion of low-proficiency English learners using prepositional dative construction is higher than that of the other two groups.The percentage reveals that the distribution of Dative Alternation selection by students with higher English proficiency is closer to that of English native speakers.2.Low-proficiency Chinese EFL learners tend to use concrete words as theme and definite pronoun as recipient in double object construction whereas English native speakers are more likely to use abstract words as theme in double object construction.In the prepositional dative construction,Chinese EFL learners tend to use concrete theme and definite recipient more than English native speakers.With the improvement of second language level,the attributes of affecting factor in the two constructions will be closer to that of English native speakers.3.According to binary regression analysis,when the theme is abstract and definite non-pronoun,and the recipient is concrete definite animate pronoun,English native speakers tend to use the double object construction.When the recipient is abstract and indefinite,and the theme is an animate pronoun,Chinese EFL learners tend to use the double object. |
