Abstract:The ditransitive construction is one of the argument structures that Goldberg put forward. Goldberg pointed out that the ditransitive construction has a family of closely related senses(a.k.a polysemous construction family), with the central sense being the actual successful transfer and the peripheral senses being respectively obligation of transfer, negation of transfer, future transfer, enablement of transfer and intention of transfer. This essay is devised to investigate the acquisition of the polysemy of English ditransitive construction by Chinese college students. Two hypotheses are made as follows: first, the central sense is learned and used better than the peripheral ones, and the acquisition levels of peripheral senses are not the same; second, senior students may acquire more senses than junior students. The data are collected from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SWECCL 2.0). The pos-tagging aid Tree-tagger 2.0 and the corpus searching aid AntConc 3.2.1 are also used in this study. To prove these hypotheses, three research questions are to be investigated in this essay. First, what are the general frequency and distribution of ditransitive constructions in the corpus? Second, how are central and peripheral senses of ditransitive constructions acquired in the corpus? Third, does the proficiency level affect the acquisition of polysemous family of ditransitive constructions? If yes, what are the demonstrations? 

SWECCL 2.0 contains 4950 English composition texts written by students at 4 different grades from higher education institutions of varied levels in China and material of TEM4-Oral and TEM8-Oral examinees during 2003 and 2007. SWECCL 2.0 is the most up-to-date and most authoritative corpus of Chinese college students' written and spoken English. To answer the three questions, we first have to pos-tag the Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners to get the same tagged corpus as WECCL. Then, the searching aid AntConc 3.2.1 is used to find out the frequency of ditransitive constructions with different senses so that we can get to know college students' acquisition level of the polysemous ditransitive constructions. To achieve that, we have to search the sentences or phrases that contain double noun constructions and then sort them into different semantic categories. After analyzing the collected data, the first hypothesis is fully confirmed in this study, and we find out there exist semantic hierarchies among the six constructional senses. The second hypothesis is partly confirmed for senior students fail to output more constructional senses but their acquisition level of the ditransitive construction is greatly improved from a different perspective. Besides, this essay provides both teachers and students with a deep and systematic explanation of the ditransitive construction as well as suggestions on how to teach and learn ditransitive constructions by a constructionist approach.

 

Keywords: ditransitive construction; polysemy; acquisition; Construction Grammar

 

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter 1 Introduction-1

1.1 Background-1

1.2 Purpose and Significance-1

1.3 The Outline of the Paper-2

Chapter 2 Literature Review-3

2.1 A Brief Introduction to Construction Grammar-3

2.1.1 The Reflection on the View of Innateness-3

2.1.2 The Reflection on the View of Universalism-3

2.1.3 The Reflection on the View of Autonomy-4

2.2 Definitions and Classifications of Construction Grammar-5

2.3 Ditransitive Construction-6

2.3.1 Definitions and Classifications of Ditransitive Construction-6

2.3.2 Semantic Properties of the Arguments-6

2.3.3 The Relationship Between the Double Noun Construction and the Dative Construction-7

2.4 Constructional Polysemy-8

2.4.1 The Cognitive Mechanism of Polysemy-9

2.4.2 The Polysemy of the Ditransitive Construction-9

2.5 Current Researches on Construction Grammar At Home and Abroad-10

2.5.1 Studies on Construction Grammar Abroad-10

2.5.1 Studies on Construction Grammar in China-11

2.6 The Acquisition Theories of Construction Grammar-11

2.6.1 The Usage-based Model-12

2.6.2 The What-you-see-is-what-you-get Approach-12

2.6.3 The Integrity and Embodiment Properties of Language-12

Chapter 3 Research Methodology-15

3.1 The Research Hypotheses and Questions-15

3.2 The Source of Data-15

3.2.1 The Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners-15

3.2.2 Proficiency Levels of the Corpus-15

3.3 The Research Procedures-16

3.3.1 The Corpus Processing-16

3.3.2 The Searching Method of the Research-18

3.4 The Senses of Ditransitive Constructions-20

Chapter 4 Results and discussion-21

4.1 General Frequency and Distribution of Ditransitive Constructions-21

4.2 The Acquisition of Central and Peripheral Senses-22

4.2.1 The Acquisition of Central Senses-22

4.2.2 The Acquisition of peripheral Senses-22

4.3 Proficiency Level and the Acquisition of Ditransitive Constructions-23

4.3.1 Lower Proficiency Level and Acquisition of Ditransitive Constructions-23

4.3.2 Higher Proficiency Level and Acquisition of Ditransitive Constructions-24

Chapter 5 Conclusions and expectations-27

5.1 Major Findings-27

5.2 Implications of the Research-27

5.2.1 The Acquisition Clue: Instances   Schema   Instances-27

5.2.2 The Acquisition order: Typical Instances   Peripheral Instances-28

5.2.3 The Acquisition Focus: Form and Meaning-28

5.3 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study-29

References-31

Acknowledgments-32