A Copus-based Study On The Use Of Psych Causative Verbs In English Majors' Writing

Psych verb is one of the most common types and an important part of the English lexicon. Psych verb reflects human's psychological activities. Psychological activities and states expressed by psych verbs show human's cognitive process. Psych verb error is referred as a "global error". This kind of error is intolerable to the native speakers because it affects the overall organization of utterances and hinders human's communication. Most of English psych causative verbs are different from Chinese counterparts in their semantic and syntactic structures, so English psych causative verbs are rather difficult for English learners. English writing reflects learners' abilities of weighing words and orderly expressing ideas. This paper intends to explore the uses of psych causative verbs in English majors' writing.Based on Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB), Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English (FROWN) and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL), the study adopts Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) and takes Antconc 3.2, SPSS 13.0 and FoxPro 6.0 as the data processing instruments. On the basis of Zhang (2000)'s classifications of psych causative verbs, the study focuses on the use of three typical psych causative verbs (shock, satisfy and worry) in English majors' writing, trying to address the following questions:(1) Do the English majors tend to overuse or underuse the three typical psych causative verbs compared with native speakers? (2) What are the English majors' deviant uses of psych causative verbs compared with native speakers? (3) What are the causes of the deviances?The findings show that (1) English majors overuse satisfy and worry significantly; as to shock, there is no significant difference in word frequency. (2) The major deviances lie in the aspects of collocation, leciacal causatives, A-ed and A-ing forms, phrase verb and periphrastic construction. English majors share some collocations of psych causative verbs with native speakers, but they are quite different in T-score and MI-score. Furthermore, English majors underuse the lexical causatives and causative adjectives—A-ing forms; English majors overuse the phrase—worry about; in terms of non-causative adjective—A-ed forms, there is no significant difference between English majors and native speakers; English majors tend to use periphrastic constructions. (3) The causes of the deviances include the first language transfer, ignorance of rule restriction, insufficient input and second language learning strategies. The suggestions are put forward to raise the learners' ability in the use of psych causative verbs. They are raising learners'sensitivity to the covered morpheme—Cause, comparing L1 and L2, increasing language input and making use of corpora.