A Study Of The English Dative Construction From The Category Perspective

The English dative construction is one of the most basic and common expressions in English,which attracts lots of scholars’ attention and interest.According to the property of inheritance and linking in constructions,the dative construction inherits some features both from the double-object construction and the cause-move construction.The meaning of the dative construction refers that the actor causes the object to move to the goal by taking an action in order to make the recipient have the ownership of the object theoretically,which is formularized as [S+V+OBJ+Prep+OBL].Lots of scholars make a scientific and systematic research on the dative construction from the synchronic and diachronic perspectives.Some of them study the generation of the dative construction based upon the relationship with the double-object construction,some of them focus on the interaction between verbs and construction of the dative construction,and others analyze the features of the topic in the dative construction with the corpus.According to the previous researches,this thesis takes the chunk as the basic unit in the dative construction and tries to study the dative construction from the interaction between the meaning category and form category in one chunk under the category.Chunk is the basic unit of the dative construction.First of all,this thesis divides the dative construction into three chunks,and they are possessor chunk,the transfer chunk and the prospective possessor chunk.The transfer chunk,including the transfer mode,the transfer object and the transfer path,counts pretty much.Second,this thesis analyzes the prototypical dative construction based on these three prototypical chunks decided by the interaction between the prototypical meaning category and prototypical form category.Last,this thesis study the dative construction from the variations of these chunks under category.This study adopts the qualitative research,corpus analysis and the control variate method.And there are three findings of this study.1.Chunk is the basic unit in the dative construction,and it is determined by the interaction between the meaning category and form category.On the one hand,the meaning category comes into being before the form category and influences the latter,which indicates the change of the form category only takes place after the change of the meaning category,and the pairing between the meaning category and the form category is not arbitary at all.On the other hand,when the chunk grows gradually fixed,the form category turns to influence and coerce the meaning category.2.The conversation context,the intention of the speakers and other factors can affect the meaning.The meaning category expands based upon the prototype with radial category structure.The form category motivated by the meaning category changes related to the prototype.When the form category and meaning category combine together,the whole chunk shows dynamic properties instead of static.3.Under the iconic of the language,these three chunks combine into the prototypical chunk chain with a certain sequence.Under the motivation of meaning category,the dative construction which is constituted by the dynamical dative chunks shows the expansion of the family resemblance related to the prototype.This research aims to provide a supplement method towards the study of construction and the diachronic study of the dative construction.The study of the interaction between the meaning category and the form category can do a little help in the language teaching and the application of CAT.