earticle

영어

The ditransitive verb 'give' has three arguments Agent, Recipient, and Goal in terms of their semantic roles. Interestingly, these arguments have certain sequence types: Agent>Recipient>Goal and Agent>Goal>Recipient. From a syntactic perspective, these two sequences have different syntactic structures, though they have the same meaning. From a functional perspective, they can be described as a certain frame of the predicate (Dik 1989). According to the predicate frame, ‘give’ has two sequence patterns: Recipient+Goal and Goal+to+Recipient. Moreover, these sequence patterns can be explained via several theories from functional grammar. In this regard, the researcher would like to focus on three factors from the theories presented by Siewierska (1988): formal hierarchies, dominance hierarchies, and familiarity hierarchies. Additionally, two more theories are discussed: phonological and psychological factors (Bock 1982; Kreidler 2003). Even though these theory-based factors describe the linear order of the two sequence patterns, they are not empirically tested on the basis of corpus data. In other words, it is necessary to investigate how these two sequences are actually used in real utterances. For this, the study descriptively analyses corpus data focusing on frequency patterns for the two sequences (Recipient+Goal and Goal+to+Recipient). According to these results, the study finds that the two sequences based on certain theory-based factors are different from those of corpus data