Interpretation And Disambiguation Of Ambiguous Chinese Double Object Constructions By Japanese And Korean Speakers

The double object construction is a structure to express the intended or actual transfer of a property and Chinese ambiguous double object construction is ambiguous in property belonging.The ambiguity problem causes trouble for people's comprehension.Various factors influence the interpretation of both native speakers and second language learners of Chinese.Based on an interpretation test,the current study aims to investigate the roles of Chinese proficiency and verb type in the interpretation and disambiguation of Chinese double object constructions by Japanese and Korean speakers and also native speakers of Chinese.Results show that for pure ambiguous double object constructions,the majority of students failed to realize the ambiguity problem,yet their choice proves the existence of ambiguity.Generally,students,regardless of language backgrounds prefer obtainment interpretation and their preference varies with each specific word.For the three ways of disambiguation,Chinese proficiency played an important role and for language background,more proficient L2 learners behaved in a more similar way to Chinese native speakers.Adding aspect marker reduced ambiguity and enhanced obtainment interpretation by 10.5%,and the possibility of third way transfer interpretation was greatly enhanced in some words.Adding direction indicator gei to a large extent(around 89%)helped the students to disambiguate.The presence of context also made some contributions yet due to the fact that students had set judgment of transfer direction of some verbs,they failed to utilize context to disambiguate.Theoretically,the findings support some of the previous studies and by conducting a more scientific and comprehensive empirical experiment,the thesis provides supplement to fill the gap in the study of ambiguous Chinese double object constructions.The pedagogical implications are also explored.