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In recent years, the study of double object construction (DOC) has been one of the most heated topics in linguistics. However, opinions diverge greatly on this issue. Many researchers give their explanations from the angle of structuralism, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, transformational-generative grammar or typology. Their study involves many aspects, such as the judgment of the criteria of the DOC, the classification of the DOC, the analysis of double object verbs, the relation between indirect object (IO) and direct object (DO), the relation between the verb and two objects, the generative process of the DOC, the prototype of the DOC, the construction meaning of the DOC and so on. They’ve amply describe the DOC and their explanations, in some sense, are persuasive.On the basis of previous study, we are going to conduct an investigation into hierarchical classification of the DOC. Our object is to build a classification system which can be applied to the understanding of natural language, bring each double object verb into the system and meanwhile mark these verbs. Therefore, we need to pay attention to the following points.First of all, we should rightly establish classifying standards of the DOC according to the need of natural language processing. An entirely semantically based approach to classification is inadequate, while a syntactically based approach is effective for natural language processing. To be specific, we have five standards, including the possessive relation between the IO and the DO, the form of the DO, the conversion between the DOC and the sentence pattern NP+从+NP1+那儿/这儿+VP+NP2, the conversion between the DOC and the sentence pattern NP+VP+给+NP1+NP2, and the conversion between the DOC and the sentence pattern NP+VP+NP2+给+NP1.Secondly, we are going to examine these verbs one by one on the basis of hierarchical classification. We bring all double object verbs in the vocabulary into our classification system according to five syntactic standards. Besides, we can also mark these verbs (See about appendix).In the end, we divide the DOC into three levels and twelve categories. There are four categories on the first level, four categories on the second level and four categories on the third level. Eight categories are located in outer space and they can not be classified any more. With the support of abundant language material in on-line corpora, we examine each double object verb in the vocabulary and find that all one hundred and twenty-four double object verbs can be included in our classification system.
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