A Contrastive Study On Syntax And Semantics Of Chinese And Thai Double Object Construction

Double Object Construction(abbreviated as DOC)has always been a hot topic in generative linguistics both at home and abroad.It is not only found in Mandarin Chinese(MC),but also in other languages.In the past few decades,researches on syntactic analysis of DOC in MC are fruitful and there are many cross-linguistic studies on DOC.However,the comparative studies on DOC in MC and Thai are few and many related questions waiting to be explored.This thesis aims to provide a comparative analysis of DOC in MC and Thai.From the syntactic aspect,we discussed three major analyses related to DOC:the transformational analysis,the causative analysis,and the applicative analysis.The applicative analysis was the latest approach to study DOC,which improves on the first two approaches in many aspects and it contributes to the syntactic derivation of Chinese double object construction.Thai language also features DOC.1)This thesis found that there have been few data materials to study the generation of Thai DOC.In addition,the thesis proved that the DOC is not transformed from the Dative Construction(DC),thus proving that the syntactic derivation of Thai DOC is not transformed from DC 2)It is further argued that the Light Verb(LV)is a lexical light verb in Chinese and the Thai double object construction is the raising high applicative structure.Therefore,we have the syntactic derivation of Thai DOC.In addition,we discussed different word order of these two languages.From the perspective of semantic feature,we start from the double object verbs,indirect objects(IO),and the relationship between direct objects(DO)and IO.This thesis made a comparative study and concluded: 1)According to Man siyu(2016)we classify the double object verbs in Chinese and Thai,in Mandarin Chinese,the verbs can be classified into three categories: internal movement verbs,external movement verbs and bi-directional movement verbs,while Thai only has internal and external movement verbs.2)After we compare the distribution and function of IO of the DOC in MC and Thai,it is believed that the IO in the MC can be animate,inanimate and functional words while Thai only has animate IO.3)From the relationship between IO and DO,we began with the thematic role.It is found that the most three frequent collocations are: content +object,sufferer+object and beneficiary +object,while Thai draws the three relationships with the highest frequency of MC and Thai: the beneficiary + object,target + object and beneficiary + content.Therefore,we conclude that after the V(Verb),the Chinese IO acquires or loses beneficial or non-beneficial entities or abstract entities.After V,the indirect objects of Thai are obtained with entities that benefit themselves.The differences in the semantics of Chinese and Thai are explored respectively.Through the cross-linguistic study of double object constructions,this thesis hopes to further understand the essence of double object structure,and at the same time may invoke further interest in cross-linguistic research of DOC in the future.