A contrastive study of the interaction between nonditransitives Verbs and the ditransitive construction in German and Chinese

Adopting Construction Grammar as theoretical framework, this article investigates the interaction between non-ditranstive verbs and the ditransitive construction in German and Chinese in order to reveal mechanisms regarding the integration of verbal participants into the constructional argument structure from a contrastive perspective. The main conclusions are as follows: 1) German exhibits a higher degree of semantic feature inheritance from the ditransitive construction in non-ditransitive double object sentences, whereas the directionality of the construction is always maintained by a certain degree of abstraction in both languages; 2) the non-ditransitive verb in Chinese appears to have such a strong coercive impact on the construction that it not only enforces various interpretations of the construction's argument roles and their semantic adjustment to its own participant roles, but also prohibits the ditransitive construction from introducing an agent argument into the double object sentence; 3) the co-occurrence of two participants of the same non-ditransitive verb within a Chinese double object sentence shows both the stronger coercive impact of the non-ditransitive verb upon the construction and a stronger potency of the construction in terms of object argument licensing.