Syntactic Treatment Of Verbs In ECLDs--An Empirical Study Based On Syntactic Theories

The present study is an attempt to tackle verbs' syntactic treatment in EGLDs in the light of the two syntactic theories, Theta Theory and Valency Theory, analyzes contrastively the measures for verbs' syntactic treatment in three ELDs and three ECLDs, and, as a result, proposes a tentative verbs' syntactic treatment model for ECLDs with the assistance of learner corpora and error analysis.The treatment of grammatical information plays a vital role in the LD compilation, and syntactic treatment, compared with morphological treatment, deserves compilers' more notice and effort. The present study focuses on verbs. To begin with, the study demonstrates the significance of verbs' syntactic treatment in ECLDs. The contrastive analysis of verbs' syntactic treatment in current mainstream ELDs and in ECLDs reveals that current ECLDs have done the work far from satisfactorily in verbs' syntactic treatment, with at least the following two defects: a) insufficiency in describing verbs' syntactic features; and b) lack of conciseness in representing verbs' syntactic features.The study decides on Theta Theory and Valency Grammar as its theoretical framework and holds the view that these two theories are adequate enough to deal with theoretically verbs' syntactic treatment in LDs. According to these two theories, only in certain syntactic structures can a lexical item be semantically and grammatically right in a phrase, clause or sentence. For a certain lexical item, its argument structure or valency structure determines its syntactic structure. The analysis of the argument structure or valency structure of a verb will lead to the sufficiency in describing the verb's syntactic features. The application of learner corpora and the error analysis of verbs' syntactic patterns based on learner corpora provide compilers with practical help in verbs' syntactic treatment.The study, on these grounds, proposes a manipulation model for verbs'syntactic treatment in ECLDs, which consists of relative morphological codes and manipulative syntactic modes. The verbs' syntactic treatment model is upon the dissective analysis of various types of verbs and their basic syntactic patterns. The model is applicable for verbs of all types in LDs.After an empirical application of the syntactic treatment model in ECLDs, the present thesis ends with some implications and limitations of the study and suggestions for further study.\...