Chinese Non-English Major University Students' Acquisition Of English Causative Verbs

Causative verbs refer to certain verbs that can be used to express a causal relationship between the subjectand the object in a sentence. Till now many people have made investigations into English causative verbs, butthey focus mainly on the definition, classification, lexicosemantic structures and functions. Relatively few focuson the L2 acquisition of English causative verbs. The present study is an attempt at finding the learning problemsin the acquisition of English causative verbs by Chinese-speaking non-English majoruniversity students.Actually, the acquisition of causative verbs involves lots of factors. This thesis probes into Chinese-speakingnon-English majoruniversity students'acquisition situations in terms of the features of English causative verbsperse. On the basis of the Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model (Comrie, 1985; Zhang Jingyu, 2003), the thesisclassifies English causative verbs into 6 categories from the weak form to the strong form on the basis of thesemantic salience:"clear"-class<"retire"-class<"break"-class<"kill"-class<"widen"-class<"make"–class. ByGJT and corpora, three structures (causative structure,"make"-structure and inchoative structure ) are examinedin terms of the five categories except for"make"–class (the acquisition situations of"make"–class can bechecked from"make"-structures). Through three hypotheses testing, the thesis finds Chinese non-English majoruniversity students have a hierarchy orderinacquiring English causative verbs; they use"make"-clas(sanalyticalcausative verbs)more than English native speakers; they are in poorcommand of the corresponding inchoativeforms of causative verbs and the learners'English proficiencies have significant influences on the acquisition ofthe causative verbs.The thesis is composed of seven parts. Part one is an introduction which reports the significance and thepurpose of the present study. Part two is the literature review which chiefly deals with the research on the L2acquisitions of English causative verbs home and abroad. Part three covers the main theories related to thepresent study, including the Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model (Comrie, 1981,1993; Zhang Jingyu, 2003),Lexicosemantic Structure Theory (Cai Yun, 2000) and L2 Vocabulary Development Theory (Jiang Nan, 2000).Part four is the empirical research. It consists of the present hypotheses, participants, instrumentation, researchprocedure, data collection and data analysis. Part five is the result for the hypotheses testing. Part six is thediscussion. In this part, it discusses the results for hypothesis testing on the basis of the three related theories.Part seven presents the conclusionand limitations.