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A Collostructional Analysis of Ditransitive Constructions in Mandarin

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Book cover Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11831))

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Abstract

By investigating the frequency distribution of 37 verbs in Mandarin ditransitive constructions and adopting a collostructional analysis (cf. Gries & Stefanowitsch [1]), this study aims to clarify the construction meaning of each type of ditransitive construction. The preliminary result shows that two constructions differ in terms of fine-grained aspects, such as the number and completion of transfer events. Based on the corpus findings, this study claims that the transfer meaning expressed by double-object constructions entails only one entire macro-event while the transfer event expressed by prepositional dative constructions highlights and involves more than one event, thus increasing the possibility of the prepositional dative conveying incomplete transfer meaning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this paper, we use the term “ditransitive construction” (in contrast with Liu’s [6] term of “dative construction”) to sum up all types of Mandarin double-object sentences. In addition, we classify the prototype of double-object ([V NP1 NP2]) and [V gei NP1 NP2] as the same category of “double-object construction” while the sentences that consist of preposition are classified into “prepositional dative construction”.

  2. 2.

    Based on the definition of ditransitive construction (see footnote 1), the term dative alternation in this paper is used to refer to the alternation between DO (double-object construction (including prototype of double-object [V NP1 NP2] and V-gei complex [V gei NP1 NP2]) and PD (prepositional dative construction).

  3. 3.

    This paper attempts to identify the construction meaning of two types of double-object construction based on the meanings of their representative verbs. Therefore, whether gei in [V NP2 gei NP1] is a preposition or a verb will not actually affect the analysis result.

References

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology research grant (MOST 107-2410-H-003-025-MY2). We would like to thank you for the reviewers’ comments and Anwei Yu’s proofreading. All errors are of course our sole responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Huichen S. Hsiao & Lestari Mahastuti

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  1. Huichen S. Hsiao
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  2. Lestari Mahastuti
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Correspondence to Huichen S. Hsiao .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China

    Yangsen Zhang

  3. Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

    Pengyuan Liu

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Hsiao, H.S., Mahastuti, L. (2020). A Collostructional Analysis of Ditransitive Constructions in Mandarin. In: Hong, JF., Zhang, Y., Liu, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38188-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38189-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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