Ditransitive Construction in English, Hungarian, Turkish, and Indonesian Language

Every language shows a different way of expressing ditransitive construction. Thus, the present study aims to investigate and compare the important elements exhibit in the languages under discussion in constructing ditransitive sentences. This paper is a qualitative study. The data comes from detailed written grammar texts, corpora, and interviews with native language speakers. The results show that the languages play with the word order to weigh the focus of sentences. English and Indonesian language do not apply any case-marking to mark the function of the noun phrase. However, in the basic prototypical ditransitive construction, Hungarian and Turkish languages apply an accusative marker to mark the theme and a dative marker to mark the recipient. On the other hand, the verbs’ affixation also affects the semantic property of the ditransitive verbs in the Indonesian language. It is also revealed that the languages use the same ditransitive construction to express genuine transfer and beneficial transfer.Keywords: ditransitive construction, cognitive grammar, comparative study.

A Corpus-Based Research on Ditransitive Constructions with Tell and Say

Learners’ errors give insights to teachers, textbook writers, curriculum designers and many applied linguists about the learning difficulty in the acquisition of a target language. Studying systematically these errors is therefore considered indispensable in learning teaching process. Basing on the corpus-based model, this paper investigates the constructions of two ditransitive verbs: TELL and SAY which cause much trouble to second language learners. After analysing the exam copies of 200 second-year students in the English department of Cheikh Anta DIOP University of Dakar, the study comes up with two general observations. First, the analysis of the overall data shows that learners of the corpus largely prefer using TELL (62, 5%) to SAY (14, 5%). The second observation is, these students use more correctly the ditransitive form involving TELL than SAY. For instance, 79, 2% of them employ TELL in the double object construction corresponding to the basic structure TELL + someone + something, while only 5,1% correctly use the dative construction of SAY which is SAY + something + to + someone. These findings conform to several studies which claim that the dative form is the most complicated construction, and is consequently the rarely used one. All of this indicates, that even if these students are English majors, they are still in their basic level in the acquisition of ditransitive constructions. This suggests that special strategies and mechanisms are required in teaching and learning ditransitive verbs. More efforts are also needed in teaching and learning constructions in grammar (e.g. alternating pairs like Passive /Active, Will /Be going to, Verb-particle constructions etc.). This will help students become more accurate in using English, the target language.

Object inversion in Icelandic and the Risamálheild Corpus

This paper discusses Object Inversion in Icelandic syntax, i.e. examples where the direct object precedes the indirect object (DO-IO orders) in active clauses. In contrast to the neutral IO-DO order, Object Inversion is incredibly rare with most ditransitive verbs and more or less restricted to ditransitive verbs in the DAT-ACC class. This is shown by extensive searches in the new Risamálheild Corpus. These searches also show that Object Inversion strongly favors examples where the DO encodes old information and is phonologically lighter than the following IO. These results yield new and important insights into the study of Object Inversion but also confirm earlier claims in the literature.

The syntax of Mandarin dative alternation

This paper investigates the syntax of dative constructions (DCs) in Mandarin from the perspective of quantifier scope interpretation. In the literature, doubly quantified DCs such as Xiaoming ji-le yi-zhang mingxinpian gei mei-yi-wei laoshi ‘Xiaoming mailed one postcard to every teacher’ have been claimed to be scopally ambiguous, and different syntactic analyses have been proposed based on this observation. Crucially, however, DCs with the universal direct object (DO) preceding the existential indirect object (IO), e.g., Xiaoming ji-le mei-yi-zhang mingxinpian gei yi-wei laoshi ‘Xiaoming mailed every postcard to one teacher’, appear to be not ambiguous, where only the existential IO seems to take wide scope. This problem, which we call the dative puzzle, has not been systematically explored, either theoretically or experimentally. To fill this gap, we conducted an experiment on the scope interpretation of dative sentences in Mandarin, which confirms the above observation. A syntactic analysis for Mandarin DCs is proposed accordingly, where it is argued that (i) DCs share the same underlying structure with shift constructions (SCs) of the form [Subj V-gei IO DO], both containing a causative vP embedded under an action verb (cf. Cheng et al. 1999); (ii) the surface form of a DC is derived by an optional, vP-internal scrambling of the DO from the lowest complement position to an adjunct position; and (iii) such scrambling does not affect scope interpretation. Our proposal suggests that, insofar as inherently ditransitive verbs are concerned, Mandarin DCs and SCs are derivationally related, and the observed dative puzzle is shown to follow from the structural hierarchy of the advocated base syntax of DCs.

Do simple syntactic heuristics to verb meaning hold up? Testing the structure mapping account over spontaneous speech to Spanish-learning children

Experimental research has shown that English-learning children as young as 19 months, as well as children learning other languages (e.g., Mandarin), infer some aspects of verb meanings by mapping the nominal elements in the utterance onto participants in the event expressed by the verb. The present study assessed this structure or analogical mapping mechanism (SAMM) on naturalistic speech in the linguistic environment of 20 Spanish-learning infants from Argentina (average age 19 months). This study showed that the SAMM performs poorly – at chance level – especially when only noun phrases (NPs) included in experimental studies of the SAMM were parsed. If agreement morphology is considered, the performance is slightly above chance but still very poor. In addition, it was found that the SAMM performs better on intransitive and transitive verbs, compared to ditransitives. Agreement morphology has a beneficial effect only on transitive and ditransitive verbs. On the whole, concerns are raised about the role of the SAMM in infants’ interpretation of verb meaning in natural exchanges.

Ditransitive constructions in Akebu

This paper contributes to the typology of ditransitive constructions. Akebu (Kwa, Ghana-Togo mountain, West Africa) has four strategies of alignment of ditransitive verbs, if both theme and recipient objects are expressed: a neutral strategy, a possessive-like strategy, a strategy with a pronominal reprise and a ‘take’ serial verb construction strategy. The possessive-like strategy that is most standard in Akebu is rare in a cross-linguistic perspective and has not been attested in other Kwa languages. The factors that license a certain strategy are person, number and noun class of the theme and recipient and the internal structure of the theme noun phrase.

Sentience-based event structure

In Blackfoot, a Plains Algonquian language spoken in Alberta, Canada, and Montana, USA, sentience, rather than telicity, is a primary determinant of argument structure. Subjects of transitive verbs, non-core objects of transitive verbs (benefactives, malefactives, sources, etc.), and primary objects of ditransitive verbs are all subject to a strict sentience requirement. This chapter follows Ritter and Wiltschko (2015) in assuming that the strict sentience requirements on argument structure are part of the grammar (i.e. part of the “narrow syntax”) of Blackfoot, and formalizes sentience as a feature that is subject to selection, a feature-checking operation, much like AGREE. This proposal correctly predicts that (a) not only agents but also causers must be sentient in Blackfoot; (b) sentient objects (not bounded ones) serve as both initiators and delimiters of events; (c) like event types, nominal types are distinguished by sentience, rather than boundedness; and (d) eventiveness is correlated with sentience, rather than dynamicity.

Bidirectional transfers of the ditransitive construction in Chinese

The Chinese ditransitive construction expresses the ‘bidirectional’ transfers: the movement of the patient either (a) from the subject to indirect object or (b) from the indirect object to subject, a feature that has not been identified in other languages. This construction is thus different from the ditransitive construction in English and other languages whose ditransitive constructions can express only a ‘single-direction’ transfer: the movement of the patient from the subject to indirect object only. This article addresses the reason for the unusual functions of the ditransitive construction in Chinese. A parallel difference between these two languages is found in the semantic structures of those ditransitive verbs: Chinese coins a single verb to express the same type of ‘transfer’ action with opposite directions, but English usually invents two distinct verbs to denote the two antonymous meanings whose directions are opposite; e.g., the Chinese verb jiè subsumes the meanings of both borrow and lend in English. This article argues that the different meanings of the ditransitive constructions of Chinese and English result from the different conceptualizations of their ditransitive verbs. In construction grammar, the following question remains unanswered: where does the meaning of the construction come from? The present analysis provides evidence that the meanings of the verbs within the construction are capable of determining the meaning/function of the whole construction.

On the peculiar nature of double complement unaccusatives in Japanese

This paper attempts to elucidate the peculiar nature of double complement unaccusatives (DCUs). Among the two widely-held diagnostics for subjecthood in Japanese, i. e. zibun-binding and subject honorification, the subject of DCUs passes the former but not the latter. First, recognizing two subtypes of ditransitive verbs, verbs of change of possession (VCPs) and verbs of change of location (VCLs), we will note that DCUs are generally formed on VCPs. Next, given our layered verb phrase hypothesis, the ni-phrase in DCUs as well as VCPs is base-generated in Spec of Low Applicative (L-Appl), and it is moved to Spec of v for dat case marking. Spec of v is high enough for zibun-binding. However, since the target of subject honorification is licensed in Spec of High Applicative (H-Appl), the ni-phrase, base-generated in Spec of L-Appl, should further move to Spec of H-Appl. This is prohibited due to a feature-based version of theta criterion.

The roots of ditransitive verbs of caused possession

Chapter 3 examines English ditransitive verbs, which show the dative alternation between indirect object and to frames, each supposedly reflecting a different template for a single manner-describing root. It shows that these two templates are semantically highly underspecified, and it is the root that fleshes out many of the surface verb’s basic entailments. These entailments include change-of-state, possession, and co-location, all of which are independently known to be templatic meanings, arguing again against Bifurcation. The root also governs whether the verb even shows the dative alternation, a root-conditioned syntactic effect. A formal analysis of root/template composition is developed that relies on manner roots being able to impose conditions on the template’s result states in ways that predict the verb’s grammatical and semantic behavior. Counterproposals that might retain Bifurcation are also considered, though it is argued that they are dispreferred for various reasons.