A Study Of The Acquisition Of English Narrow Range Dative Verbs By Chinese Learners Of English

Double object construction has been the focus of language research for manyyears. And abundant previous researches have been devoted to studying the doubleobject constructions from the perspective of syntactic structures. However, previousstudies did not reach a consistent conclusion for the complexity of the double objectconstructions. In the field of language acquisition, researchers have been involved inthe study of the acquisition of the double object constructions based on differenttheories and hypotheses and made fruitful achievements.Based on the Narrow Range Rules proposed by Pinker (1989), the present studyaims to investigate the acquisition of English narrow range dative verbs by Chineselearners with different language proficiency levels in three aspects: learners’ semanticsensitivity to Narrow Range Rules; the overgeneralization of the use of Narrow RangeRules, the influence of language proficiency. Specifically, this thesis explores thefollowing three questions:1. Are Chinese EFL learners sensitive to Narrow Range Rules?2. Does overgeneralization of the DOD constructions observed in L1and L2alsooccur in EFL contexts？3. How does language proficiency affect the acquisition of English narrow rangedative verbs?90students participated in the study, consisting of30Middle School students,30High School students and30college students. They were sorted into three groups, thebeginners, the intermediate and the advanced groups, according to their length ofexposure to English. Based on Pinker’s classification from semantic perspectives, fourclasses of narrow range datives were selected as test items, Throw, Push, Tell andWhisper class datives. And two words were chosen from each class with two forms:real and nonce forms. On the basis of data analysis, I have obtained the followingfindings；1) Chinese EFL learners are not sensitive to Narrow Range Rules;2) Overgeneralization is observed in the acquisition process;3) The role of language proficiency varies.The present study also suggests that only adequate input, explicit teaching,negative evidence and mastery of syntactic features can learners acquire the narrowrange dative verb alternation at the syntactic level.