Constructional Transfer In English Majors' Acquisition Of English Resultative Construction

Recently, resultative construction has received great concerns among linguists home and abroad. Many scholars have conducted theoretical studies from diversified perspectives. The structural approach stresses on the internal linguistic structure at the expense of semantic study, based on which the structuralist view of language acquisition gives priority to the drills of sentence patterns and structures. The transformational-generative approach maps the intrinsic feature of verbs into the syntactic structure, focusing only on the argument structure of verbs. Cognitive approach has investigated resultative construction within the framework of Cognitive Construction Grammar, considering resultative construction as a form-meaning pairing. Despite various theoretical studies on resultative construction, few have explored the acquisition of English resultative construction, let alone its empirical studies. Therefore, this thesis conducts an empirical study on transfer in the acquisition of English resultative construction by English majors. This thesis argues that constructional transfer will take place in the acquisition of English resultative construction by English majors. By means of empirical studies, the thesis has illustrated how constructional transfer takes place and has proven the great role played by construction in the acquisition of English resultative construction. This thesis is divided into six chapters:Chapter one"Introduction"presents the research rationale, research objectives, methodology and layout of the thesis.Chapter two"Literature Review"reviews pervious studies of resultative construction and its acquisition, and gives a brief introduction of pervious studies on transfer. The limitations and unsolved problems have been pointed out in this chapter.Chapter three"Theoretical Basis"proposes a new theoretical model Constructional Transfer Hypothesis which targets at the gaps of transfer theories.Chapter four"Methodology"formulates the research questions based on the research objectives, and presents the design of the experiment and results. Chapter five"Results and Discussion"processes the collected data with SPSS. Then the results have been analyzed and discussed comprehensively so as to answer the research questions respectively.Chapter six"Conclusion"summarizes the thesis. Based on the research results, this chapter presents some pedagogical implications, the limitations of the thesis and the suggestions for future study.