A Study On The Features Of Chinese Learners’ Use Of The English Ditransitive Construction

The English ditransitive construction, syntactically represented as [SUBJ [V OBJOBJ2]] and semantically associated with the sense that the agent argument acts tocause transfer of an object to the recipient, has long been and also remains one hotissue in the linguistic field. It has prompted scholars from different schools to makein-depth theoretical inquiry from various perspectives.However, few empirical studies are conducted. In view of this, this corpus-basedstudy is carried out to explore the features of Chinese EFL learners’ use of the Englishditransitive construction. Specifically, the following questions are to be dealt with:1. What are the features of the English ditransitive construction produced byChinese EFL learners at different proficiency levels?2. What are the similarities and differences in the use of the ditransitiveconstruction by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers?Three sub-corpora of CLEC, ST2, ST5and ST6, are selected and investigated tocompare with the results from ICE-USA written component. Based on a holistic viewof language under the framework of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar and dataextracted by Antconc, a collostructional strength analysis of verbs as well as asemantic and syntactic analysis of agents and recipients is conducted.It is found that a very limited set of verbs are attracted to the ditransitiveconstruction, and13of these verbs are shared. Despite that the constructionalstrengths and rank of these verbs vary greatly across corpora, give, tell and teach arestrong collocates. Moreover, verbs instantiating the central constructional sense do notdominate the strongest collocates, some of which are licensed by metaphor. On thewhole, agents and recipients in both CLEC and ICE-USA written component aredominated by human ones and pronouns. Only agents in ST6are dominated by non-human agents and nouns. Non-human agents take up a larger proportion than non-human recipients. Generally speaking, the ratio of non-human and noun agents andrecipients grows larger as the proficient level becomes higher.This paper is comprised of six chapters.Chapter One is a brief introduction of the research background, researchquestions, significance of the study and organization of the paper.Chapter Two is the literature review, which explicates the definition,constructional senses and semantic constraints of the ditransitive construction, andreviews some relevant theoretical studies on ditransitive construction.Chapter Three serves as the theoretical framework of the study, which introducesthe holistic view of language of Construction Grammar. Chapter Four, research design, elaborates on the collostructional strength, theselected corpora, tools, and the specific procedures of how the research is conducted.Chapter Five, data analysis and discussion, presents the analysis of the data andreports the results.Chapter Six, the conclusion, is dedicated to presenting the major findings, somepedagogical implications, the limitations and suggestions for future study.