A Study On Chinese Learners’ Phrasal Verbs Using Under The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

Phrasal verb originally comes from English idioms,in the view of construction grammar,construction is an inseparable pair of meaning and form,any linguistic structure can be regarded as construction as if one certain aspect of the function or form in a linguistic structure can not be predicted directly from its components or already existed constructions.Since the meaning of phrasal verbs is unpredictable,the form of phrasal verbs is of great diversity,and the application of phrasal verbs is changeable,phrasal verbs have presented numerous obstacles for Chinese learners’interpretation and application process.This research takes construction grammar as its theoretical foundation,by adopting the Coll.Strength analysis method,this research is dedicated to explore the following three questions from the frequency and meaning of phrasal verbs:1.What are the differences between Chinese learners and native speakers in using phrasal verbs?2.What are the characteristics of Chinese learners in using phrasal verbs?3.What are the potential factors that lead to the differences between Chinese learners and native speakers in using phrasal verbs?Aiming at these three research questions,the author selects LOCNESS and WECCL as the corpora used in this research,in order to guarantee the effectiveness of corpora and the equality of size,only the third grade texts are chosen as Chinese learners’ corpus.To explore the difference between Chinese learners and native speakers in using phrasal verbs,all the phrasal verb constructions are going to be searched out with the help of concordance tool.After recording and analyzing different kinds of phrasal verbs,a paired-T test will be applied on the frequency of different kinds of phrasal verbs.To explore the characteristics of Chinese learners in using phrasal verbs,the author chooses two kinds of phrasal verbs to conduct the Coll.Strength analysis.After the analysis on the collocating strength of verbs and particles and the analysis on the cluster of verbs in phrasal verb constructions,the preferring and avoiding trends of Chinese learners in using phrasal verbs can be driven out.To analyze the reasons for these differences and characteristics,the author expand the research from three aspects to investigate the differences and characteristics,which are separately meaning of the construction,predicate extension and argument structure.With the help of the statistics and results in WordNet and Sketch Engine,it has been proved that the differences and characteristics of Chinese learners are closely related with the constructional features of phrasal verb construction.After the procedures listed above,major findings of this research are as following:as for the frequency of phrasal verbs,Chinese learners generally use more phrasal verbs than native speakers,but the differences are not significant.As for the types of phrasal verbs,the phrasal verbs used by Chinese learners and the phrasal verbs used by native speakers are of the same type.After the investigation about V+up and V+out construction,it has been found that Chinese learners tend to overuse and underuse some phrasal verbs,and the reasons of overusing and underusing phenomenon can be attributed to three aspects,namely construction polysemy,metaphorical extensions and construction profiling.