A Corpus-based Statistical Modeling of Instance Prototypicality of Chinese Dative Alternation
Construction alternation,which refers to the interchangeable use of near-synonymous constructions,has gained considerable attention in the field of Construction Grammar over the past few decades.Dative alternation is a type of construction alternation frequently observed in both English and Chinese,which involves the alternating use of a double object construction and a prepositional dative construction(Bresnan and Ford 2010;Röthlisberger et al.2017;Zhang and Xu 2019).For example:(1)a.Who gave that wonderful watch to you?b.Who gave you that wonderful watch?(Bresnan and Ford 2010:169)(2)a.Zhang San song Li Si yiben shu.'Zhang San gave Li Si a book.'b.Zhang San song yiben shu gei Li Si.'Zhang San gave a book to Li Si.'(He 2009:18)Example(1a)illustrates the prepositional dative construction in English,and(1b)represents the double object construction in English,which together represent the English dative alternation.(2a)depicts the double object construction in Chinese,and(2b)represents the prepositional dative construction in Chinese,where gei serves as the recipient marker,introducing the recipient Li Si.These two examples(2a)and(2b)represent the Chinese dative alternation.While previous studies on the prototypicality of constructions have primarily used introspective methods,this study aims to provide a corpus-based statistical approach to explore the prototypicality of constructions.This study employs linear discriminant analysis to investigate the prototypicality of instances of Chinese dative alternation based on large-scale richly annotated corpus data.The results indicate that instances with the highest linear discriminant scores are prototypical instances of Chinese double object constructions,whereas those with the lowest linear discriminant scores correspond to prototypical instances of Chinese prepositional dative constructions.The prototypicality of the remaining instances can be assessed by the differences between their linear discriminant scores and those of the prototypical instances.
Chinese dative alternationlinear discriminant analysisprototypical instanceprototypicality of constructioncorpus
万方数据
维普
