Ditransitive Constructions Research Articles

How Metonymy Affects Korean Ditransitive Constructions

How Metonymy Affects Korean Ditransitive Constructions

Relative Strength of Influence of Five Factors Involved in Korean Learners’ Choice of English Ditransitive Constructions

This study aims to examine the relative strength of influence of the five factors that are known to be involved in Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ choice between the two English ditransitive constructions. The five factors include animacy of theme (T), definiteness of T, pronominality of recipient (R), length difference between T and R, and semantic class of individual verb. In order to explore how differently the five factors influence Korean EFL learners’ choice between the adpositional construction (AC) and the double object construction (DC), the study used the Korean section of the TOEFL 11 corpus and conducted three correlation tests: ϕ, V, and rpbis. From the results, the following were observed: (1) the length difference between R and T had the strongest effect on the Korean EFL learners’ choice between AC and DC and (2) the relative strength of influence of the five factors examined in the Korean data set was different from those examined in a native English speaker data set. The study ends with a discussion of pedagogical implications of the findings.

INTEGRATION OF VERBAL AND CONSTRUCTIONAL INFORMATION IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE PROCESSING OF ENGLISH DATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

AbstractThis study investigated the effects of construction types on Korean-L1 English-L2 learners’ verb–construction integration in online processing by presenting the ditransitive and prepositional dative constructions and manipulating the verb’s association strength within these constructions. Results of a self-paced reading experiment showed that the L2 group spent longer times in the verb–construction integration in the postverbal complement region when processing the ditransitive construction, which is less canonical and highly avoided in the learners’ L1, than when processing the prepositional dative construction, which is more canonical and shares similar structural features with the L1 counterpart. In the following spillover region, L2 learners showed faster reading times as proficiency increased when the verb was strongly associated with the prepositional dative construction. Our findings expand the scope of current models on L2 sentence processing by suggesting that construction types and L2 proficiency may affect the L2 integration of verbal and constructional information.

An Analysis of the Frequency of Ditransitive Construction in EFL Textbooks of Junior and Senior High School in Japan – Based on Usage-based Model –

An Analysis of the Frequency of Ditransitive Construction in EFL Textbooks of Junior and Senior High School in Japan – Based on Usage-based Model –

(In)animate Subject and Ey or Eykey Marking: With Reference to Morphological Passives

The by-phrase in English passives is marked either with eykey, ey, or ey uyhay in Korean morphological passives. The ey-marked NP in the morphological passive can be an individual human entity only when it is monosyllabic. The eykey-marked NP in the morphological passive must be animate. However, they have something in common in that they can have an animate or inanimate syntactic subject. The eykey-marked goal in the ditransitive construction and the eykey-marked causee in the morphological causative must be animate. The ey-marked NP in the morphological passive may or may not be animate, while the ey-marked goal or causee must be inanimate. What is more important here is that the morphological passive, the ditransitive construction, and the morphological causative all permit animate or inanimate subjects.

Reconstructing the ditransitive construction for Proto-Germanic: Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic

AbstractThe semantic range of ditransitive verbs in Modern English has been at the center of linguistic attention ever since the pioneering work of Pinker (1989.Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). At the same time, historical research on how the semantics of the ditransitive construction has changed over time has seriously lagged behind. In order to address this issue for the Germanic languages, the Indo-European subbranch to which Modern English belongs, we systematically investigate the narrowly defined semantic verb classes occurring in the ditransitive construction in Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic. On the basis of data handed down from Proto-Germanic and documented in the oldest layers of the three Germanic subbranches, East, West and North Germanic, respectively, we show that the constructional range of the ditransitive construction was considerably broader in the earlier historical stages than now; several subclasses of verbs that could instantiate the ditransitive in early Germanic are infelicitous in the ditransitive construction in, for instance, Modern English. Taking the oldest surviving evidence from Germanic as point of departure, we reconstruct the ditransitive construction for an earlier proto-stage, using the formalism of Construction Grammar and incorporating narrowly defined semantic verb classes and higher level conceptual domains. We thus reconstruct the internal structure of the ditransitive construction in Proto-Germanic, including different levels of schematicity.

Data from ‘The Dative Alternation Revisited: Fresh Insights from Contemporary British Spoken Data’

The dataset covers the so-called “dative alternation”. The dative alternation (also referred to as the ditransitive or double-object construction) refers to parallel constructions that have broadly similar meaning but different syntax: i. he gave it to the board” ii. “I gave her my old one” In i., the verb “give” takes a noun phrase (the pronoun “it”) and a prepositional phrase as arguments (“to the board”), while in ii. the verb takes two noun phrases (“her” and “my old one”) as arguments. In the dataset, we refer to i) as “VNPP” and ii) as “VNN”. We refer to the indirect object role as “recipient” (“her” in i. and “the board” in ii.) and the direct object as “theme” (“it” in i. and “my old one” in ii.). The dataset was collected from the Early-Access Subset (EAS) of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 [1] for use in a sociolinguistic study of competing linguistic constructions [2]. The corpus is now publicly available via CQPweb at https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/bnc2014spoken . The dative alternation is a topic of active research in linguistics, but few studies have made datasets available. Meta-studies, creation of specialised NLP tools, and comparisons of results will benefit from better access to this dataset.

Pegah Faghiri, Pollet Samvelian, Barbara Hemforth. “Is there a canonical order in Persian ditransitive constructions? Corpus based and experimental studies”

This study is a continuation of a series of corpus-based and experimental studies on the relative order between direct object (DO) and indirect object (IO) in the preverbal domain in Persian. It provides complementary data on the subject and tries to display the interplay of a set of functional factors or soft constraints in determining this relative order. To meet this objective, first the authors discuss some challenges to the existing views based on their results from corpus-based studie...

World-Wide Comparative Evidence for Calquing of Valency Patterns in Creoles

Creole languages consistently show valency patterns that cannot be traced back to their lexifier languages, but derive from their substrate languages. In this paper, I start out from the observation that a convincing case for substrate influence can be made by adopting a world-wide comparative approach. If there are recurrent matches between substrate and creole structures in a given construction type, in creoles of different world regions and with different substrates, then we can exclude the possibility of an accident, and substrate influence is the only explanation. The construction types that I will look at are ditransitive constructions (Section 3), weather constructions (Section 4), experiencer constructions (Section 5), and motion constructions (Section 6). I will draw on the unique typological data source from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (Michaelis et al., 2013a; 2013b). My conclusion is that the data provided in AP i CS support the claim that during creolization, valency patterns have been systematically calqued into the nascent creoles.

“Which Came First: The Chicken or the Egg?” Ditransitive and Passive Constructions in the English Production of Simultaneous Bilingual English Children

This article aims to shed light on the syntactic status attributed to ditransitive constructions— double object construction (DOC) and to/for-dative—with respect to which type of structure is syntactically transformed through a process analogous to that of passives. We will do so by providing an analysis of the ditransitives and passives that appear in the English production of a set of English/Spanish simultaneous bilingual twins. Our results show that DOCs start being produced earlier than to/for-datives. However, the age of onset of passives differs in the children though it is consistently produced later than ditransitives. Likewise, adult input goes hand in hand with the children’s production of ditransitives and passives since the high frequency of DOCs in this input, as opposed to the low frequency of to/for-datives and passives, is refected in child output. These fndings thus suggest that to/for-datives could be said to be derived from DOCs although, given the later acquisition of passives, no frm conclusions can be drawn as to whether this is done via a passive-like process. Keywords: ditransitives; double object constructions; to/for-dative structures; passives; bilingual acquisition; input . .

On the Formation of Modern Chinese Pseudo-Possessive-Object Constructions

Abstract Modern Chinese Pseudo-Possessive-Object Constructions (shortened as Modern Chinese PPO constructions; e.g. ta shuo le wo de haohua (他说了我的好话) ‘he has put in a good word for me’ and ta chi le wo de doufu (他吃了我的豆腐) ‘he has taken advantage of me’) are actually constructions displaying possessor-affectee syncretism. They derive from Early Modern Chinese Real-Possessive-Object constructions in bridging contexts, some examples being wo ye quande liewei daren de jiu (我也劝得列位大人的酒), ‘I also urged all the magistrates here to finish drinking your wine’ and shi nage zai jie wo de duan li (是那个在揭我的短哩) ‘who is uncovering my demerits’. Di-transitive constructions in Middle Chinese and Early Modern Chinese (e.g. Changxing! quan er yibei jiu (长星，劝尔一杯酒) ‘Comet! I urge you (to finish drinking) a cup of wine’ and shuru gan jie wu duanchu (竖儒敢揭吾短处) ‘how dare the Confucius scholar uncover my demerits’) have provided structural templates for the formation of Modern Chinese PPO constructions. They also have led to a condition in which there are more examples of a maleficiary Modern Chinese PPO construction than examples of a beneficiary Modern Chinese PPO construction (e.g. ta chi le wo de doufu (他吃了我的豆腐) ‘he has taken advantage of me’ vs. ta shuo le wo de haohua (他说了我的好话) ‘he has put in a good word for me’). The grammaticalization pathway can also explain the formation of other constructions including another Modern Chinese PPO construction (e.g. ta chi le wo de kui (他吃了我的亏) ‘he has suffered the loss caused by me’), a Modern Chinese pseudo-object construction (e.g. wo ganxie ni de haoxin (我感谢你的好心) ‘I thank you for your kindness’), and a Modern Chinese pseudo-modifier construction (e.g. wo pa le yi xiawu de shan (我爬了一下午的山) ‘I did mountain-climbing for the whole afternoon’).

Alternating constructions with ditransitivegebenin present-day German

AbstractThis paper reports on a corpus-based investigation of the verbgebenin two alternating ditransitive constructions in present-day German with theRecipienteither coded in the dative case (the indirect object construction, abbreviated: IOC) or by means of the PPan+ accusative case (the prepositional object construction, POC). The study is based on a quantitative analysis ofN=1,301 sentences (712 IOC and 589 POC) drawn from theDeutsche Referenzkorpus(IDS, Mannheim) which were annotated for 20 factors. Using a logistic regression analysis, we found evidence for the effect of 10 predictors (bootstrapped C-index=95%). We discuss our results in comparison to corpus-based research of the English dative alternation and point to some notable differences between both languages. In German, POC appears to be strongly correlated with collectiverecipients, collectiveagents, passive voice, and concrete and propositional transfer senses of the main verbgeben. With regard to the semantics ofgeben, we argue that the quantitative findings are best accounted for on the basis of a general underspecified verb meaning ‘gebentransfer’ that does not yet differentiate between the three possible verb senses (concrete, abstract, and propositional).

현대 중국어 이중타동구문의 의미확장에 관한 고찰 -인지언어학 이론을 중심으로-

현대 중국어 이중타동구문의 의미확장에 관한 고찰 -인지언어학 이론을 중심으로-

On the Word Order of Ditransitive Constructions in Northwestern Chinese

Many studies (e.g., Ren 2004, Xu 2013, Zhou 2016) noticed the oddity of the SOV order of Northwestern Chinese in the context of Chinese as an SVO language, while much less attention has been given to word order in ditransitive constructions in Northwestern Chinese. This article examines the word order of ditransitive constructions in Northwestern Chinese dialects. In general, different ditransitive constructions belong to or are close to different language patterns (either the Chinese pattern or Altaic/Tibetan pattern). DOC and DDC-I in some SVO dialects represent the Chinese pattern. DatC-I and DDC-II have one additional feature that represents the Altaic/Tibetan pattern; i.e., the R is in front of the V. DDC-III and DatC-II, which exist only in the preferred SOV dialects, are closer to the Altaic/Tibetan pattern because the dative marker is postpositional. DatC-III, appearing in SOV dialects, completely turns to the Altaic/Tibetan pattern since the T also moves in front of the V. After the examination above, two typological features emerge. First, in some dialects, the R and T fall on different sides of the V, which is typologically rare. Second, the R is in front of the V, which is different from the placement in Mandarin Chinese. Both features are induced by language contact with Altaic/Tibetan languages in the same area. During language contact, some constructions in recipient languages change faster than others. For example, Wang and Dede (2016) demonstrated that the negative markers in the Xining, an SVO dialect, have little freedom of movement, and they must appear adjacent to the verb they modify; and the noun of a place of destination is located before the verb in SVO Northwestern Chinese. Both are different from Mandarin Chinese. This reveals that even if the basic word order of some Northwestern Chinese dialects is still SVO, the effect of language contact exists in a somewhat unremarkable manner, leading to gradual changes in word order. Take DatC-I as an example. One may not notice that DatC-I relates to language contact, since Mandarin Chinese seems to have the same kind of construction (i.e., the benefactive construction). However, after close observation, we find that DatC-I is the most common and natural construction for expressing a giving event, whereas the benefactive construction in Mandarin Chinese does not apply only to giving events. Therefore, DatC-I is a true ditransitive construction, whereas its formal counterpart in Mandarin Chinese is not. If these “quiet” changes are noticed, one can better grasp the complete picture of language change.

Revisiting Hudson’s (1992) OO = O2 hypothesis: a usage-based variationist approach to the English ditransitive construction

In an important paper on the English “double-object”, or ditransitive, construction, Richard Hudson proposes a hypothesis that conflates the ditransitive direct object, or O2, and the monotransitive direct object, or OO, into the same syntactic functional category. While making important departures from a number of unfortunate assumptions within mainstream formal theories of linguistics at the time, the OO = O2 hypothesis itself is problematic in the perspective of contemporary cognitive linguistics. This paper addresses the hypothesis from the perspective of usage-based construction grammar. Applying simple collexeme analysis and multifactorial heatmap analysis to instances of OOs and O2s in ICE-GB, this paper shows that the usage-patterns of both are far too complex, displaying cross-register variation, for the OO = O2 hypothesis to be tenable. The findings provide support for a usage-based variationist account in defining syntactic functional categories.

A study of a syntactic and semantic analysis of possessive verbs constructions and a proximity with dative verbs constructions

The semantic features are structuralized into the semantic structures, and such semantic structures are closely related to the syntactic structures. Through the diverse syntactic/semantic characteristics of the Korean sentences, it is possible to precisely approach and analyze semantic features. The purpose of this paper is to examine the syntactic/semantic characteristics of the possessive construction involving possession and to set the subject­conceptual structure of the possessive construction. The sentence meaning of the possessive construction can be defined as “the agent with a will dominantly owns the target”. To lexical­internally describe the characteristics of the possession, the conceptual semantics(Jackendoff) is used as a methodology. In addition, the possession is semantically closely related to the existential construction and ditransitive construction. The existential, possessive and ditransitive constructions are detected through the concept that they are based on a fixed semantic correlation.

The syntax and semantics of dative DPs in Russian ditransitives

In this paper we propose a syntactic analysis of dative DPs in ditransitive constructions in Russian, answering three questions: (I) what semantic roles the indirect object realizes; (II) how it is syntactically ordered with respect to the direct object realizing the theme argument, and (III) how the first two issues are related to the morphological encoding of the indirect object, as a PP or as a morphologically case-marked DP. Addressing first question (II), we show that two kinds of syntactic hierarchies between the two internal arguments of a ditransitive configuration coexist, and that there are two sorts of datives that are hierarchically higher than the theme: those that can reconstruct and those that cannot. We then establish an interpretative correlation between these two types of dative DP, showing that the former is locational and the latter is not, providing the answer to question (I) and elucidating what underlies the morphological similarity, question (III). The interpretative and syntactic differences between scrambled and base generated high datives lead us to claim that in Russian, dative ditransitives have two distinct underlying structures that are not derivationally related. A scalar approach to event structure enables us to pinpoint the interpretative correlate of each type of dative (locational vs. non-locational) and provides a conceptual argument in favour of a non-synonymy non-derivational approach we pursue here: a path scale encoding event schema cannot be transformed into a different scale based event schema due to movement of the dative DP. Finally, the scalar approach allows us to identify the lexical correlates of a possessive interpretation of the high dative vs. a more beneficiary-like interpretation. Extent scales allow the former whereas property and path scales facilitate the other.

As construções de movimento causado e ditransitiva: elos de polissemia

RESUMO Este trabalho compara duas construções de estrutura argumental do Português Brasileiro - as construções de movimento causado e ditransitiva - para investigar seus elos de polissemia, com base em aspectos sintáticos, semânticos e pragmáticos que elas possam compartilhar. Segundo Goldberg (1995), as construções tipicamente se associam a uma família de sentidos distintos mas relacionados, formando uma rede inter-relacionada. Esse parece ser o caso das construções focalizadas aqui. A análise de instâncias reais dessas construções mostrou que elas compartilham o mesmo padrão sintático, embora tenham significados diferentes.

Di-transitive Constructions in Persian Based on the Minimalist Program

<p>This article studies the structure of double-object constructions, a challenging structure in Persian, based on Bowers’ (1993, 2001) minimalist approach. The major goal here is to evaluate the effectiveness of Bowers’ approach in analyzing such constructions. First, we reviewed the Persian grammarians’ analyses of transitivity and the continuity of the transitive system which claims that there are verbs with one object at one side of this continuum and verbs with two objects at the other side. Based on this analysis, transitivity differs from verb to verb. In other words, di-transitive verbs are more transitive than other verbs because they have to get two objects so that the omission of one of these objects makes the construction ungrammatical. In this study we used Bowers’ approach (1993, 2001), i.e., double predication phrase design, to analyze the above mentioned structures in Persian. Later the sequence of the direct-indirect object was identified to be the unmarked grammatical sequence in Persian based on native speakers’ language intuition.</p>

Latin verbs with double accusative and their passivization

The goal of this paper is to re-examine the behaviour of Latin verbs taking double accusative from the perspective of functional-typological research on the so-called “ditransitive constructions”. I will focus on two aspects: the types of passivization allowed by these verbs and the alternating types of constructions to which they give rise, depending on the encoding of the two object arguments.