A Study On The Interaction Between Verbs And Constructions Based On Corpus And Its Application In Teaching English Writing

As for what types of linguistic information people often use to construct the meaning of asentence, the traditional verb-centered view emphasizes the role of the main verb, which can projectargument structures of its own and decide the form and meaning of the sentence. On the contrary, theconstruction-centered view highlights the independent meaning of constructions in sentenceinterpretation. Nowadays, an increasing number of linguistic researchers attach more importance tothe interaction between verbs and constructions. However, these studies mainly focus on theoreticalaspects with a lack of empirical researches. Hence, this study will provide an analysis of theinteraction between verbs and constructions based on the actual adoption of constructions in corpus.With Construction Grammar as the theoretical foundation, some representative verbs inconstructions are extracted from CLEC and BROWN to analyze the interaction between verbs andconstructions in two dimensions, i.e., different verbs in the same construction and the same verb indifferent constructions. At the same time, distinctions are also observed in terms of constructionsbetween CLEC and BROWN based on Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis to find out deficienciesChinese EFL learners suffer from.It is observed there exist three categories of interactions between verbs and constructions, that is,match between verbs and constructions; the constructional coercion; and the verbal coercion. Match isusually involved in verbs of the central sense, whereas coercion is associated with verbs of extendedsenses. The cognitive mechanism of coercion seems to be metaphor and metonymy.It is also discovered that Chinese EFL learners overuse central sense of constructions restricted toseveral prototypical verbs, which results in the phenomenon of fossilization. On the contrary, nativespeakers involve each sense with various verbs. In addition, different characteristics of constructionsare detected among Chinese EFL learners with different English proficiency. Beginners with lowinteractive capability favourite prototypical verbs while intermediate and advanced learners withhigher interactive capability employ various verbs in the ditransitive construction.In view of research findings mentioned above, this interaction is applied to teaching Englishwriting. The interactive strategy is employed to deconstruct the fossilization, thus improving students’writing. In this way, the study may provide certain implications for English teaching.