A Preliminary Analysis For The "Transfer" Type Ditransitive Construction In Chinese

This thesis focuses on the "transfer" type Ditransitive Construction in modern Chinese. We develop our analysis in the following four aspects: to list the sentence patterns of the "transfer" type Ditransitive Construction; to capture the correlation between these sentence patterns; to locate the basic sentence pattern and analyze the syntactic derivation of it and its transformations; and to find out the constraints on the choice of these sentence patterns.There are mainly four sentence patterns concerning the 'transfer" type Ditransitive Construction: S₁: V+DO+P+IO; S₂: V+DO+IO; S₃: V+P+IO+DO; S₄: V+IO+DO. We assume that S₂ is derived from S₁ through the Phonetic-Form-Deletion of the dative preposition, and it is the phonological Economy Principle that triggers this phonetic deletion. S₄ comes from S₃ via the same process.Based on Larson's Thematic Hierarchy, we suggest that S₁ should be the basic sentence pattem. Adopting the Feature-checking Theory, the syntactic derivation of S₁ is analyzed within the framework of Derivation by Phase.(DP₁=Subject; DP₂=Direct Object; DP₃=Indirect Object)Due to the preposition stranding constraints, the dative preposition is pied-piped along with the indirect object when it is fronted. As the preposition is affixialized, it incorporates into the matrix verb, forming the v-V+PP compound. The derived S₃ is then formed. As the sentence is sent to FP and LF after syntactic computation, there are syntax independent phonetic, semantic and pragmatic factors which will affect the final Spell-out of the sentence. In the "transfer" type Ditransitive Construction, we suggest that the constituent ordering is influenced by the Heaviness and Newness of the DO and the IO, resulting the alternations between S₁ (/S₂) and S₃ (/S₄).