The Conceptual Structure of GIVING Event and the Difference Between English and Chinese Double Object Constructions

With regard to double object constructions in English and Chinese, it has been noticed that in the former, the constructional meaning determines the meaning of the whole sentence, while in the latter, the meaning of the verb plays a decisive role. On the basis of corpus data, this paper further reveals that:1) The double object construction in English is the primary syntactic realization of ditransitive construction, while that in Chinese is the secondary; 2) The double object construction is more productive in English than in Chinese. It is proposed that the conceptual structure of GIVING event might be explicated in the form of macro-event, which is composed of a main event and a co-event. For the GIVING macro-event, the main event consists of PARTICIPANT and META-GIVING, while the co-event consists of PRECONDITION and MANNER. The essential difference between English and Chinese double object constructions resides in the different ways for construing the conceptual structure of GING event. In Chinese, the double object construction is no more than a structural type, which provides three syntactic slots for the encoding of three participants and the burden of encoding META-GIVING is placed on the verb. In English, the double object construction has the additional role of encoding META-GIVING, which gives the verb the freedom of encoding PRECONDITION and MANNER. This proposal is not only capable of explaining the known linguistic facts, but also in accordance with the usage-based approach of cognitive linguistics and explainable in cognitive terms.