A Corpus-based Study On Chinese English Learners' Use Of The English Caused-motion Construction

This thesis investigates the acquisition of English caused-motion construction from the perspective of Construction Grammar initiated by Goldberg (1995).English caused-motion construction is always a hot topic in linguistics. It has one fixed syntactic structure to express the typical caused-motion sense, sense A:X causes Y to move Z. Based on this core sense, Goldberg (1995) also differentiates and interprets four extensional senses of this construction, including sense B (X causes Y to move Z after certain satisfactions), sense C (X enables Y to move Z), sense D (X prevents Y from moving Z) and sense E (X helps Y to move Z).This special property contrasts with Chinese caused-motion constructions which has different constructions to express them respectively. Therefore, from the perspective of Construction Grammar, this thesis applies Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) and Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and studies the employment of 25 verbs of five senses to produce English caused-motion construction. According to the productions of this construction entailing five senses formed by Chinese EFL learners tested in CLEC and native users studied in LOCNESS, the present author tentatively concludes the acquisition of English caused-motion construction and its senses by Chinese EFL learners.It has been found out that:1) Compared with native users, the situation how Chinese EFL learners acquire English caused-motion construction is similar to that of native users, which is mostly based on several high frequency verbs. Although this finding corresponds to Goldberg's findings on children's acquisition of argument structure, Chinese EFL learners overuse some of them, especially put; 2) In terms of senses of this construction, native users produce more constructions entailing some senses, while Chinese EFL learners produce fewer of them. Although the productions of this construction entailing sense A account for most of the total productions in both corpora, constructions entailing sense C are produced more frequently by native users than by Chinese EFL learners, which indicates that there may be certain hierarchies among different senses of this construction; 3) Even though the proficiency of Chinese EFL learners is improved, they do not correspondingly show any tendency on the acquisition of this construction or its senses. In particular, the production of learners with intermediate proficiency (st4) differs greatly from that of the ones with lower proficiency (st2) and the ones with higher proficiency (st6) in these aspects or aspects mentioned above.In the end, suggestions of how to teach and learn English caused-motion construction are put forward. In the meanwhile, this research certainly has some limitations which could be the improvements for the future research.