A Syntactic Study On The Passivization Of English Ditransitive Verbs And Their Constructions

From the perspective of the prototypical analysis and passivization of English ditransitive verbs, this thesis focuses on the issue of passivization of English ditransitive verbs and their constructions.English ditransitive verbs and their constructions are important phenomena of natural human language, and passivization is also an important means of transforming sentence structure. The scholars home and abroad have conducted a large amount of researches on the English ditransitive verbs, but most of the studies are focused on the interrelationship between the double object construction and the dative construction with little shared research result, while so far there is few syntactic analysis on the different situations of passivization of different English ditransitive verbs and their constructions.The prototypicality of English ditransitive verbs has been discussed on the basis of the passivization, construction grammar and corpus studies; and according to the Minimalist Program and the theory of Transitivity, this paper analyzed the two different passive sentences of the typical ditransitive verbs, and put forward a unified syntactic explanation to the passivization of English double object construction.The writer claims that the English ditransitive verbs can be divided into two groups (prototypical and non-prototypical) according to their different situations of passivization in the corpus research. Those ditransitive verbs which can be passivized into two passive structures are prototypical ditransitive verbs, while those verbs which can be transformed into only one passive structure are non-prototypical ditransitive verbs, and the latter group of verbs can form their corresponding double object construction or dative construction because they are temporarily assigned the feature of prototypical ditransitive verbs.According to the principles of Chomsky's Minimalist Program, especially the Inclusiveness Condition, this thesis holds the viewpoint that one of the necessary conditions for the derivation of the passive structure I (NP [theme] VP to NP [patient]) lies in that its D-structure is not transformed from the unmarked prototypical double object construction but its corresponding dative construction. Therefore, the writer proves the rationality of the following relationship between the double object construction and the dative construction as follows: the dative construction is the basis, and the double object construction is generated from its corresponding dative construction, otherwise the syntactic derivation will be crashed.Under the guidance of the Minimalist Program and the theory of Transitivity, the passivization of English ditransitive verbs can be summarized as follows: all the English ditransitive verbs can be passivized into the passive structure I which is generated from its corresponding dative construction, but only the double object construction of the prototypical English ditransitive verbs can be passivized into the passive structure II (NP [patient] VP NP [theme]) because they haven't lost their features of transitivity in the process of passivization, while the double object construction of the non-prototypical ditransitive verbs cannot be passivized into the second type of passive structure because all the non-prototypical ditransitive verbs have lost their features of transitivity in the process of passivization.