Construction Meaning Of The Double Object Constructions In English And Chinese

Double Object Construction (DOC), as an important language phenomenon in English and Chinese, has been the research focus of many domestic and foreign linguists.This thesis firstly discusses the previous studies made on the syntactic structure and the construction meaning of English and Chinese DOCs, and finds that all of them have some inadequacies. Moreover, the thesis discovers that no consensus has been reached on the construction meaning of English and Chinese DOCs. Based on the previous studies, this thesis redefines the DOC from the structural point of view and the cognitive point of view respectively.Then, through comparative analysis, this thesis tries to give a cognitive account for the difference between English and Chinese DOCs, that is to say, the thesis tries to explain why there are English and Chinese DOCs that contain verbs identical in meaning but describe different situations. Whereafter, according to the comparison of verbs used in English and Chinese DOCs, the thesis finds out their differences in types and reaches the conclusion that all types of verbs that are allowed to enter English and Chinese DOCs should be connected with path construal. The thesis proposes that there is a null path-indicating preposition before the indirect object (IO) in DOC, based on which, the complicated semantic roles of IO argument and the generation of the path construal can be explained clearly. However, the path construal discernible in both English and Chinese DOCs is not salient cognitively but weakened in the DOC by virtue of the fact that path-indicating preposition is not realized morphologically. With the path construal downplayed or retiring into the cognitive background, the'cause to have'meaning or'cause to lose'meaning accordingly comes into the cognitive front-stage and hence becomes prominent or fore-grounded. Moreover, based on language facts, the thesis finds that neither'cause to have'meaning nor'cause to lose'meaning is comprehensive enough to completely cover the construction meaning of English and Chinese DOCs, so the thesis also makes further generalization in this regard.At last, it is found that the construction meaning of the DOC construction should be'to cause to transfer'. And given that the word'transfer'has two lexical meanings, one being"moving something from one place to another"and the other being"handing over something to somebody", this thesis argues that the construction meaning of English and Chinese DOCs should be specified as"cause to move something from one place to another".