Study Of The Semantic Development Of Polysemous Motion Verbs Among Chinese College EFL Learners

In the English language, many high-frequency words are polysemous. As revealed by cognitive linguistics, polysemous words are radial categories of their interrelated senses. Given the importance of polysemous words, it is necessary to study, with appropriate tools, how these polysemous words develop among the FFL learners and find out the possible factors that affect this development.The current study attempts to investigate the semantic development of three English polysemous motion verbs (REACH, FOLLOW and FALL) among the Chinese EFL learners at tertiary level. Three groups of learners (freshman English majors, junior non-English majors and junior English majors) were selected from a college in Shandong Province. They represented different stages in semantic development. Each group was subdivided randomly into two parallel sub-groups. One group was administered a reception test of the separate senses of the three verbs; while the other group took a productive potential test. The data collected were processed by SPSS 11.0.As revealed by data analyses, the three groups of learners showed no significant difference in the reception and production of REACH. Both FOLLOW and FALL showed overall upward trends in both reception and production except that the JNMs and the JEMs showed no significant difference in the reception of FALL. By and large, REACH was the easiest to comprehend while FOLLOW the hardest. In production, the learners performed the best in REACH and the worst in FALL. The learners could understand most of the verb senses successfully. Compared with reception, the learners still had much room for further development in the production of the verb senses. Frequency and influence from the L1 conceptual system may be two major factors that affect the learners'mastery of the separate senses of the target words. The current study suggests that explicit teaching should be necessary for polysemy and the insights gained in cognitive linguistics should be applied. In addition, the learners should pay more attention to the collocations or constructions which certain word senses are associated with.