Chinese Students' Acquisition Of Polysemy Of Phrasal Verbs

Phrasal verbs, which are pervasively used in English, are generally defined as combinations of verbs with adverbial or prepositional particles. They make up an essential part of everyday communication. Therefore, the understanding and use of them is very important for learners. However, learners often find that phrasal verbs are most difficult and troublesome in the lexical area, and the main difficulties lies in their multiple senses and the application of them. Polysemy of phrasal verbs is difficult to acquire for foreign language learners because those multiple senses are seen as unrelated and unsystematic. They often learn the multiple senses by rote or infer the senses from the context. However, rote learning is time-consuming and ineffective. In addition, inferring the senses from context is not as effective as what people expect, and there is no evidence to prove that it can guarantee the long-term retention of those senses or it can improve the leaner's'productive ability of the target phrasal verbs.Cognitive Linguistic research on polysemy has suggested that: different senses of one polysemous word are interrelated through a core meaning; they are extended and reextended from the core meaning. And the motivations of the extension are metaphor, metonymy and image-schema transformation. These insights can be applied to teaching as well as learning polysemous phrasal verbs. The interface between Cognitive Linguistics and second language vocabulary acquisition has become one of the hottest issues recently at home and abroad. Some applied linguists abroad apply the polysemy theory in Cognitive Linguistics to the second language vocabulary acquisition and gain satisfactory results. Among them only a few scholars give their attention to phrasal verbs acquisition, and the limitations in their research are as follows: most researches are restricted to the learners'use of phrasal verbs; a few are the empirical studies on the applying Cognitive Linguistics theories into the teaching and learning phrasal verbs; and there is no empirical study that investigates whether the learners'awareness of the cognitive motivation of senses extensions in phrasal verbs can enhance their ability to use the target phrasal verbs; or there is no empirical evidence of beneficial effects of this way of learning on vocabulary retention in the long term. The researches in China focus on the analysis of the phrasal verbs with Cognitive Linguistics theory and seldom on empirical studies.Hence it is practical and essential to apply the results of Cognitive Linguistics research on polysemy into empirical studies of Chinese learners'acquisition of polysemy of phrasal verbs, so the present study proposes that improving the learners'awareness of the cognitive motivations of sense extensions in phrasal verbs can be beneficial to learners'vocabulary retention and their productive ability of polysemy of phrasal verbs, and also provides an empirical study to prove that.With the polysemy theory in Cognitive Linguistics as the theoretical ground and the freshman of Non-English majors as the subjects, the present study attempts to discuss the following issues: 1) is it difficult for the subjects to handle the polysemy of phrasal verbs and do they know relatedness of multiple senses in a phrasal verb? 2) Will the subjects'receptive and productive knowledge of polysemy of phrasal verbs be improved by knowing cognitive motivations of senses extensions of them? 3) Will the subjects'long-time acquisition of polysemy of target phrasal verbs be improved effectively by knowing cognitive motivations of senses extensions of them?By analyzing the data collected both quantitatively and qualitatively through SPSS (13.0), we came up with the following findings: 1) the subjects did poorly in acquisition of the multiple senses of phrasal verbs, and they did not know how the multiple senses were related; they usually learned the first three senses listed in the dictionary or by context by rote; 2) knowing the cognitive motivations of senses extensions of the target phrasal verbs will be helpful to the students'receptive and productive knowledge of polysemy of target phrasal verbs; 3) this cognitive way of learning imposes a positive effect on phrasal verb long-time acquisition and the subjects of experimental group hold positive attitudes towards it.