Putting BREAK To Use: Prototypes And Meaning Extension

The task of vocabulary acquisition has always been a challenging undertaking for foreign language learners, and to acquire the productive knowledge of them, such as their associations, inferences of their uses, meaning extension, etc. seems to be "a mission impossible". The Prototype Theory can offer implications for vocabulary acquisition, especially the meaning extension and inferences. This thesis makes a comparative study of the polysemous basic verb break in L1 and L2 context with the purpose to get ideas on their similarities and differences in prototype identification and ways of meaning extension. This research was made in terms of Prototype Theory, and the following questions were addressed: 1) Do the native speakers and Chinese English learners have the same identification of the prototypes for the verb break? 2) Does significant difference exist between the subjects' meaning extensions in the two languages? 3) Is L2 meaning extension influenced by L1 prototype identification? 4) What are the principles and regularities that guide the meaning extension?About 110 sophomores from different majors of China University of Geosciences and 34 native speakers of English joined the research. The Chinese subjects have learned English as a second language for about 8 years; the native subjects are Americans and New Zealanders with various educational and professional backgrounds. The research instrument includes two questionnaires and two corpora. The questionnaires were designed in light of the experimental paradigms of Prototype Theory, which consist of the free elicitation test, the typicality-rating test, the word association test and the translatability rating test. Meaning extension of the verb break in actual discourse was also compared between the searching results from BNC (British National Corpus) and CLEC (Chinese Learners of English Corpus). The data were analyzed by SPSS with the independent sample test, Pearson Correlations and descriptive statistics.The research results show the identity of the verb break's prototypes identified by native English speakers and Chinese English learners, but its meaning extension inferred by native speakers and Chinese learners reveal significant differences. It is also found that the L2 meaning extension is influenced by L1 prototype identification.It is also found that the extension from the prototype is neither arbitrary nor predictable; they are motivated by such principles as metaphor, metonymy, family resemblances, etc. Meanwhile, these cognitive mechanisms may be culture or language specific.This research can contribute to the development of the Prototype Theory and also offer implications for L2 language vocabulary teaching and acquisition. Due to the identity of the prototype of the basic verb break, it is not so difficult a task for Chinese learners to grasp the L2 prototypes; instead, more focuses shall be put on the meaning extension.