A Study On Non-typical Double-object Constructions In Chinese Within The Framework Of Construction Grammar

Since the conception "Chinese double-object construction" was first proposed by Yang Shuda (1920:148), many scholars have made continuous researches on this topic. Although they have achieved fruitful results, there are still some inadequacies. Firstly, these studies mainly focus on the typical double-object constructions with the meaning of "giving" and "getting" or a certain kind of non-typical double-object construction. They fail to study of all the non-typical double-object constructions systematically. Secondly, structural linguists fail to provide a reasonable explanation of the irregular phenomena. Generative linguists exaggerate the dominant function of the verbs in the non-typical double-object constructions. However, they neglect the function of the whole construction. Thus, this thesis conducts a systematic study on these non-typical double-object constructions as a whole and explores the constructive mechanisms of each type of these non-typical double-object constructions in Chinese within the framework of construction grammar.According to the definition of construction proposed by construction grammar (Goldberg,1995:4), the Chinese double-object construction is actually viewed as argument structure with semantics independent of the lexical meaning. It should be defined as an form-meaning pairing with the form of "V+NP1+NP2" and meaning of "transfer". On this basis, through the investigation of the prototypical characteristics of Chinese double-object construction and the syntactic and semantic features of the non-typical double-object constructions, in this thesis it is believed that in the non-typical double-object constructions there exists a kind of transfer (positive transfer or negative transfer) between the agent and the patient, which violates the prototypical characteristics of the typical double-object constructions. According to the classification of Chinese double-object construction (Wang Yin,2011b:98) and the application of double-object verbs, the non-typical double-object constructions in Chinese can be classified into five categories:off-site positive transfer, potential transfer, zero transfer, interrupted transfer and off-site negative transfer. In addition, this thesis also explores the constructive mechanisms of the non-typical double-object constructions in Chinese. Based on the related features of transfer events in the objective world, speakers will have the requirements to form non-typical double-object constructions in Chinese, and then different mechanisms will be applied according to different non-typical double-object constructions in Chinese:construction coercion, lexicon coercion, accommodation coercion and multiple coercion. The constructive mechanism of each type of the non-typical double-object constructions in Chinese is presented with diagrams.To sum up, guided by the construction grammar, this thesis endows each type of the non-typical double-object constructions with programmatic constructive mechanisms, which guarantees the simplicity of theory and the sufficiency of explanation. Meanwhile, this thesis also provides insights for future researches.