A Corpus-based Study on Ditransitive Construction "Give" in English Writing

Under the framework of Goldberg's Construction Grammar, this study analyses the "give" frequency, the preference of the patient argument and errors types with the help of quantitative approach and qualitative analysis. It aims at providing senior high school students with some methods to improve their English writing proficiency and yield some suggestions on English foreign language teaching to teachers. The main findings are as follows: (1) Chinese senior high school students overuse the information type of direct objects to express advice on patient argument. However, native speakers use more types of patients; (2) in terms of different language proficiency levels, there are still divergences existing among low level and high level learners. The general tendency is that high level learners have a better understanding of "give" DC than lower learners.