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Shvoong Home>Arts & Humanities>ossession and the structure of the double object construction in English and Chinese Summary

ossession and the structure of the double object construction in English and Chinese

Article Summary   by:TsingHua     Original Author: Modern Foreign Languages
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This article introduces and develops Harley?s analysis of the double object construction. The double object construction and the prepositional object construction are often viewed as different surface instantiations of the same underlying structure. However, they have meaning differences and thus are not transformed from one another. The double object construction has its own structure, which is different from that of the prepositional object construction. Iniew of the differences between the two constructions, Harley decomposes the verbs give, send, etc. in two ways. The double object construction is characterized by the decomposition CAUSE + HAVE whereas the prepositional construction contains CAUSE + LOC. He claims that different decompositions of the verbs give rise to meaning differences between the two constructions. After analyzing different classes of the double object construction in English and Chinese, we propose a new model, which is similar in spirit to Harley?s. Our model departs from Harley?s mainly in that ±HAVE is used instead of HAVE. English has only +HAVE whereas Chinese has both +HAVE and -HAVE. This new model gives a unified analysis to structures of different double object constructions.
Published: April 20, 2005   
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