Focussing on the prototypical ditransitive verb give and the non-prototypical ditransitive verb bring, this paper aims to explore the similarities and differences in the use of English ditransitive construction between Chinese English learners and English native speakers based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0 (WECCL 2.0). The findings are as follows: (i) Chinese English learners prefer to use pronouns as the recipient of the ditransitive construction for both of the verbs; however, English native speakers use more NPs as the recipient for the verb give; (ii) Chinese English learners seldom use inanimate entities as the recipient of both of the verbs; (iii) Chinese English learners’ learning of the non-prototypical ditransitive verb bring is influenced by the prototypical ditransitive verb give; (iv) compared with their English counterparts, Chinese English learners tend to use more simple expressions as the theme role bearers of the ditransitive construction.
1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. Method
4. Results
5. Discussion
Works Cited