A Corpus-based Study On Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of English Periphrastic Causative Constructions

Construction Grammar, established in the late 1980s, has gone through considerable developments during the short period of thirty years as an innovative theoretical pattern of Cognitive Linguistics. Goldberg, the founder of Construction Grammar, advocates that the basic units of language are not syntactic units and rules but constructions, which are defined as "form-meaning pairs". In Goldberg's point of view, the linguistic system is viewed as a continuum of successively more abstract constructions, from single morphemes to abstract constructions. Laying much emphasis on semantics, Goldberg creatively introduced the notion of "Constructional Meaning" and successfully applied it to the semantic analysis of argument structure.The semantics of several similar English periphrastic causative constructions led by the causative verbs cause, make, have, and get has been drawing attention of linguists. In the viewpoint of Chomsky, the founder of Transformation-Generative Grammar, these causative verbs are considered as "light verbs" which have been semantically bleached. Namely, the English periphrastic causative constructions led by these verbs could be interchangeable. As a rebellion to Transformation-Generative Grammar, Construction Grammar holds the "No Synonymy Principle", which states that "if two constructions are syntactically distinct, they must be semantically distinct" Moreover, this difference in meanings is attributed into the difference in the constructional meanings from different constructions. In this sense, those English periphrastic causative constructions must have distinct constructional meanings. Gilquin has ever summarized these distinctive meanings based on the data from native speakers'corpus. As adopting a usage-based research model, Construction Grammar pays much attention to the research on language acquisition. Though literature on Construction Grammar at home mushrooms in recent years, the researches on the acquisition of a certain kind of constructions under the framework of Construction Grammar remain scarce, especially the research on the acquisition of constructional meanings of English periphrastic causative constructions is still a gap. Therefore, this thesis systematically surveys Chinese learners'acquisition of English periphrastic causative constructions under the framework of Construction Grammar in an attempt to provide some enlightenment for second language teaching.By means of the instances of seven English periphrastic causative constructions [X CAUSE Y V to-inf], [X MAKE Y V inf], [X MAKE Y V pp], [X GET Y V to-inf], [X GET Y Vpp], [X HAVE Y V inf] and [X HAVE Y Vpp] retrieved from SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners), this thesis attempts to answer the following research questions:What are the overall characteristics of Chinese learners'acquisition of the seven English periphrastic causative constructions? Is the acquisition of the respective constructional meanings of these constructions reflected to some extent in the Chinese learners'output? If so, how much is the degree of Chinese learners'acquisition of different constructional meaning? Is Chinese learners'acquisition of different constructional meanings of these constructions related with their English proficiency? How does the pattern of such acquisition develop?Through the frequency analysis and collostructional analysis of the instances retrieved from Chinese learners'corpus, the thesis produces the major findings as follows:1. Chinese learners'acquisition of the seven English periphrastic causative constructions generally reflects the "Constructional Teddy Bear" phenomenon, which means that when faced with the several similar periphrastic causative constructions, Chinese learners would probably prioritize the causative constructions led by the typical causative verb make which has been early learnt and widely used instead of choosing the causative constructions led by the atypical causative verbs. Chinese learners'output of these constructions has not displayed the distinctive stylistics preferences, indicating that they lack the awareness of register to some extent in use of these constructions.2. Chinese learners have output some instances with constructional meanings of each causative construction, which means they have acquired the distinctive constructional meanings to a degree. But this degree is still low in that the instances with constructional meanings from their output are of insufficient token and type frequency. Their semantic preference is not as conspicuous as that of native speakers.3. Chinese learners'acquisition of the constructional meanings of the seven causative constructions is related with their English proficiency and such acquisition develops linearly during the period of four years.As far as these results are concerned, it is suggested that the constructional perspective should be established in the second language pedagogics, which calls for the attention on constructional meaning teaching. Teachers should consciously offer the instances expressing different constructional meanings to the learners and teach them to link the distinctive constructional meanings with distinctive syntactical structures, in case of the isolation between lexical teaching and grammar teaching which is frequently seen within the traditional pedagogics of English at home.