The Processing And Acquisition Of English Light Verb Constructions

The English Light Verb Construction(LVC)is semi-idiomatic,semi-productive and interchangeable.The existing researches on its processing and acquisition are still far from complete and have largely ignored the role of its usage distribution.Guided by the assumptions of usage-based linguistics,the present study investigates the processing and acquisition of the LVC by English native speakers and high-level Chinese English learners through corpus and psycholinguistic approaches.Focusing on the usage features of light verb constructions,specifically prototypical exemplars,frequency and contextual usage patterns,the present research aims to answer the following questions:how do English LVC distribute in the corpus?What special features does English LVC have in terms of prototypical exemplars,frequency distribution and contextual usage patterns?Do these features,i.e.prototypical exemplars,frequency distribution and contextual usage patterns,influence the processing of LVC by native speakers and learners?How similar or different is L2 learners' processing from that of native speakers?The present research starts with a usage-based investigation of the LVC in the British National Corpus(BNC)to find out their semantic clusters,frequency distribution and contextual usage patterns that are later used in the psycholinguistic experiments.With the data retrieved in the corpus study,the present research conducts a plausibility survey,a self-paced reading experiment and two ERP experiments to investigate and compare the influence of prototypical exemplars,construction frequency and contextual usage patterns on the LVC processing of native speakers and learners.Corpus and semantic analysis show that LVC form distinct semantic islands that cluster around high-frequency,prototypical exemplars.Overlapping LVC usages exist between different light verbs,but not always used in similar contexts.Comparing to SVO,LVC's follow-up context is highly concentrated.The analysis also generated prototypical exemplars,high-and low-frequency usages used in later experiments.Self-paced reading experiment on Chinese English learners and plausibility survey on English native speakers both show that the low-frequency usages that are semantically related to high-frequency,prototypical exemplars are more readily accepted and processed faster than those do not.However,processing advantage in Chinese English learners is delayed until the preposition immediately following the LVCs.The interview with the subjects reveals that learners acquire the form of LVC better and faster than their functions.ERP experiment 1 examines the influence of frequency on LVC processing.Significant frequency effects are found in both native speakers and learners.Native speakers show clear frequency effects at the final word of the LVC(N400)and the preposition(P200)followed.Learners also show advantage in the processing of high-frequency LVC.However,such advantage,like in the self-paced reading task,is also delayed as frequency effects are found at the preposition following the LVC(N400)and the noun phrase(late sustained negativity)at the final position of the sentence,while no effect is found at the final word of the LVC.ERP experiment 2 examines the role of contextual usage patterns and frequency in the processing of LVC and SVO.No difference is found at the final words of high-frequency LVC and high-frequency SVO.However,significant difference is found in the processing of the preposition following the LVC and SVO,though in different ERP components(Natives:P200;Learners:late sustained negativity).Based on these results,the present research suggests that:1)LVC are characterized as both low-level schemas and prototypical categories.Its"semi-idiomaticity","semi-productivity" and "interchangability" is closely connected to such distributional features;2)The distributional features of LVC influences their processing by both native speakers and Chinese English learners.The input-and statistics-based categorical learning mechanism plays an important role in their acquisition of LVC.Prototypical examplars,construction frequency and contextual usage patterns exert a crucial influence on the productivity,entrenchment and processing prediction of LVC;3)The learners' LVC knowledge is developed in an unbalanced way,which can be attributed to reasons including the special features of the LVC,L2 learners' characteristics,their cognitive features and learning environment;4)The native speakers and learners adopt different processing strategies:the native speakers exhibits more automaticity,while the learners rely more on memory retrieval and working memory computation and evaluation.Such difference may be attributed to the different entrenchement levels of their LVC knowledge.