A Cognitive Approach To English And Chinese Ditransitive Construction

The ditransitive construction has existed commonly in English and Chinese, attracting a lot of linguists'attention for its complexity and particularity. The ditransitive construction as one of the often used and special patterns has been studied by many linguists home and abroad, who explain many problems from the aspects of traditional grammar and transformational grammar. However, none of them can provide satisfying explanation. The cognitive linguists argued that the ditransitive construction can be recognized as a gestalt, which restricts its components and also obtain meaning from them.It is significant to analyze the English and Chinese ditransitive construction under the guidance of cognitive linguistics. The present thesis applies the construction grammar theory to analyze the linguistic phenomenon, that is to say, we shall not concentrate our attention on the concrete and specific sentence but the ditransitive construction, which is a pair of form and meaning. One of its basic viewpoints is that the construction, combination of the form and meaning, has no specific words but corresponding semantic and pragmatic function to the form. The construction is a basic unit of language, which is a gestalt. And a comparative study can explore internal similarities and differences between the English ditransitive construction and Chinese ditransitive construction.According to my analysis, we try to make a comparison between the English and Chinese ditransitive constructions. We find they have the same prototypical sense: the volitional agent transfers the patient to the willing recipient successfully, and the prototypical verb give(gei). And there are also some differences between them. In the English ditransitive construction, the patient is transferred from the agent to recipient,while in the Chinese one, the patient can move from the agent to the recipient and vice verse. That is to say, the semantics of the English ditransitive construction is one-directional. While that of its Chinese counterpart is bidirectional. So in English ditransitive construction, the verb is that of right-movement. The verb in Chinese ditransitive construction can be divided into three types, that of hat of right-movement, that of left-movement, and that of bidirectional movement. This also can prove that the English construction exerts a higher coercion degree on its verb than the Chinese counterpart. And lexicalization degree of English construction is higher than Chinese one.The thesis consists of six parts.The first part gives a brief introduction to the title, objectives of the study and the organization of the thesis.The second part is the literature review of the generative work and the theoretical framework and adopted theories: metaphor, metonymy and construction grammar, which is an approach to language that is based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize the world.The third part employs adopted theories: construction grammar, metaphor and metonymy to examine the syntactic and semantic properties of the English ditransitive construction, then investigates relationship between the prototype and the marginal members. With the help of metaphor and metonymy mechanism, the marginal members are generated from its prototype through five models: CAUSE-SATIFACTION CONDITION FOR CAUSE,CAUSE-NEGATION FOR CAUSE,CAUSE-FUTURE TRANSFER FOR CAUSE,PART FOR WHOLE,CAUSE-ENABLE FOR CAUSE.The fourth part is a construction analysis to the Chinese ditransitive construction. And its syntactic and semantic properties are also studied. Then the relationship between the prototype and atypical members is discussed.The fifth part is a comparison between the English and Chinese ditransitive construction in the corresponding parts.The sixth part is the conclusion, where the results and shortcomings are given.