A Corpus-based Study On English Lexical Causatives Used By Chinese And Native College Students

Causation is an universal phenomenon in human languages,one of the linguistic representation about the way human recognize the relation between cause and effect(Pinker,1989).Since 1960 s,researchers of different linguistic schools have conducted many studies from various perspectives about causation.These researches mainly cover topics like the generation and decomposition of causative meaning,the transformation and generation of causative syntactic structure,psych causative verbs,the acquisition of causative verbs and so on.Corpus-based study approach has made it possible to conduct a contrastive research about causatives based on corpus of large scale.Previous researches have found that compared with native English speakers,Chinese students tend to overuse analytic causative structure(make/let/have+object+complement)while they use much less lexical causatives.However,current studies of Chinese students’ use of causative structures are mainly about analytic causative structure while less attention is paid to lexical causatives.Besides,the corpus materials in previous studies are relatively old,which makes the study about Chinese students’ use of lexical causatives more significant.Therefore,based on corpus materials,the thesis studies lexical causatives in the English writings by Chinese college students,a nd compares them with those used in the writings by native English college students.The study selects all the 436 English writings by Chinese college students in Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(TECCL)and full samples of writings in Louvain Corpus of Native English Writings(LOCNESS)with about 7044 writing samples;LOCNESS is adopted as the reference corpus.The former sub-corpus is named as TECCL-C.The thesis summarizes previous studies about causatives and divides lexical causatives into Zero causatives and Affixational causatives;zero causatives are further divided into identical-shift lexical causatives and simple lexical causatives.The research methods are listed as follows: First of all,the author selects all the causatives from Vocabulary Syllabus for College Students(2000)and chooses those from the Lexicon of CET4 and CET6 level;then the selected causatives are classified according to the classification framework in the thesis.With the help of Antconc3.4.4,the lexical ca usatives are searched in TECCL-C and LOCNESS respectively.Finally,the author employs Log-likelihood calculator to check whether there exists significant differences about several types of lexical causatives in the two Corpora and makes a summary about the differences and similarities about the use of lexical causatives.The thesis finds that there are some similarities between Chinese and Native college students in their use of lexical causatives:(1)Similar use sequence in terms of the total frequency about several types of lexical causatives exists in Chinese college students’ and native college students’ English writings: simple lexical causatives>affixational lexical causatives>identical-shift lexical causatives.(2)There are some overlaps about the most frequently used affixational and simple lexical causatives in the two corpora;Chinese college students may overuse some of these lexical causatives such as “improve” and “reduce”.(3)Like native speakers,Chinese college students can master the use of many lexica-l causatives.For example,the influence of mother tongue may help Chinese students to use words like “beautify” and “purify”;Chinese college students can use some causatives with “-fy”,“-ize” or “-ate” suffix idiomatically.For example,instead of “make something/somebody stable”,Chinese college students tend to use the related l-exical causative “stabilize”.The research found that the overall standard frequency of lexical causatives used by Chinese college students is larger than that by native college students.There are many differences between the two parties in the use of lexical causatives,which will be listed as follows:(1)There are significant difference about the use of affixational causatives in Chinese and Native college students’ English Writings;Chinese students use much more affixational causatives.But they may also overuse some of these causatives like “improve”,“increase” and “enhance”;unlike native speakers,Chinese college students use more prefix-shift lexical causatives.(2)There are significant difference about the use of simple lexical causatives between the two parties and Chinese students use more simple lexical causatives;unlike Chinese college students,native students can diversify their simple lexical causatives while Chinese college students use them in an unbalanced way;Chinese tend to use those commonly used lexical causatives while paying much less attention to other alternatives with similar meaning.Factors influencing the phenomenon above may be language transfer,English teaching and learning strategy and the lack of language input;The author summarizes the major structures of simple lexical causatives in LOCNESS as “S+V+O” and “S+V+O+C”.The former is divided into “S+psych lexical causatives+O” and “S+other simple lexical cauastives”;the latter is divided into “S+V+O+do/to do something”,“S+V+O+prepositions/-ing/adj/adv”,“S+V+O+that clause” and “S+V+reflexives+C”.It’s crucial for Chinese college students to be familiar with these structures.(3)There are no significant difference in the use of identical lexical causatives between the two parties,but the phenomenon of oral tendency and register confusion exists in Chinese college students’ English writings;unlike Chinese,English may incorporate the meaning components of ACT(CAUSE)and STATE into one lexical caisatives.Therefore,Chinese college students are more likely to use the related analytic causative structure like “make/have+O+pleased/interested/worried” rather than lexical causatives “please” and “interest”.These findings prove that although the total frequency of lexical causatives in TECCL-C is larger than that in LOCNESS,There still exist some gaps about the use of different types of lexical causatives in the two corpora.Chinese college students should pay attention to some problems like register confusion,the overuse and the synonymous use of lexical causatives.At last,the author provides some suggestions for English teaching and learning about lexical causatives in the future: English teachers can introduce some large and reliable native English corpus materials to help students master the use of lexical causatives;teachers are supposed to teach students the systematic knowledge about lexical causatives;students can adopt the paraphrasing method to memorize lexical causatives.