The Acquisition Of English Raising Verbs By EFL Learners

Nowadays, English raising and control verbs have attracted more and more scholars' attention. There are a lot of theoretical studies on English raising verbs. However, there are few empirical studies on the acquisition of English raising verbs. Unlike other types of verbs, English raising verbs do not select any NP argument, and raising is a form of argument control in which an argument that belongs semantically to a subordinate clause is realized syntactically as a constituent of a higher clause. Because of the semantic and syntactic features of English raising verbs, it is difficult for native speakers of English and Chinese EFL learners to acquire them. This thesis addresses the reasons why Chinese learners of English find English raising verbs (e.g. seem) difficult to learn.The purpose of this thesis is to address the following questions:(1) Can Chinese EFL learners distinguish the occasions on which English raising and control verbs are used? (2) Are Chinese learners of English sensitive to the semantic or syntactic features which help native speakers of English to choose to use English raising verbs? (3) Are the general proficiency levels of Chinese learners of English related to their degrees of sensitivity? Chinese EFL learners of three English proficiency levels ranging from low to high did a fill-in-the-blank test which was mainly adapted from Becker's fill-in-the-blank test. The test consists of 40 sentences among which 20 are test sentences and 20 are fillers.The results show that Chinese learners of English as a foreign language are also very sensitive to an inanimate subject paired with a stative predicate in determining raising verbs; they use NP subject as a cue in using the control verbs. But they are not very sensitive to expletive it and there subjects. Although Chinese EFL learners can make some distinctions about where to use English raising verbs and English control verbs, the general proficiency levels of Chinese learners of English are not significantly related to the degree of sensitivity to raising verbs.The results are explained in the framework of generative grammar, and the role of UG in L2 acquisition of English raising verbs is one of the reasons why Chinese learners of English find the acquisition of English raising verbs difficult. Overgeneralization and fossilization are also the two mechanisms to explain the results. Therefore, in order to help Chinese learners of English to better acquire English raising verbs, teachers should tell the semantic and syntactic features of ERVs clearly in the process of learning, and should help learners to improve their sensitivity to these features.