Appling Radial Categories To Interlanguage Variation

"Interlanguage Variation" has always been an important research subject in second language acquisition (SLA). Some previous researchers have delved into the effects of various factors on interlanguage variation through utilizing different theoretical frameworks and methods, trying to find the regularity hiding behind the variable phenomena in interlanguage. Previous studies have shown that interlanguage variation is a result of the concerted action of a complex series of factors, all of which may interact with each other. Although great achievements have been made in this field, there are still some controversies. Therefore, it is necessary to do further research on interlanguage variation. Formed in the late1960s and early1970s, second language acquisition has got a history of more than forty years so far. Over the years, following in the footsteps of researchers in other branches of linguistics, investigators have continuously applied theoretical results in different areas to the field of second language acquisition. In view of the latest developments both at home and overseas, there are generally two paths for second language acquisition research:the cognitive perspective and the social-cultural perspective. Therefore, the present thesis attempts to apply cognitive linguistics to the research of interlanguage variation. As an emerging and important component of cognitive linguistics, construction grammar is a construction-based cognitive approach which claims that construction is a form-meaning or form-function pairing. In the process of accounting for second language acquisition, construction grammar underlines that language is a system composed of constructions. Therefore, second language acquisition is the acquisition of constructions to a great extent. Although many scholars both at home and abroad have already introduced construction grammar as well as other cognitive linguistic theories to the field of second language acquisition and got some valuable results, most of them rest on the level of theoretical studies, and few empirical studies are still in a tentative stage. Even fewer researchers have conducted systematic studies of how second language learners might perform variably in the acquisition of English constructions from the cognitive linguistic perspective. As a result, the present thesis chooses an important concept in cognitive linguistics---radial categories---as the influencing factor and carries out a systematic study of Chinese college English learners’interlanguage variation in the acquisition of English argument structure constructions so as to discover the regularity and offer some beneficial implications to second language teaching and learning.At first,90students from three different universities are selected as the subjects, and all of them are required to finish four written tasks in the allotted time, which include two translation tasks from Chinese into English, the rating task as well as the finding relations task. Through the English proficiency test and the selection of the efficient responses,44of the students are finally chosen as the subjects for the present study.According to the results of the research, the performances of second language learners show obviously systematic variations in the process of acquiring English argument structure constructions under the influence of radial categories:1the more prototypical the semantic meaning of a construction is, the higher recognition accuracy of its prototypicality will be achieved.2the more concrete, prototypical the sense of a certain construction is, the higher accuracy will be achieved by second language learners in the acquisition of that construction.3the more obvious second language learners prefer to comprehend constructions from the perspective of radial categories, the more accuracy can be achieved when they output the meanings of non-prototypical constructions.The main findings discovered from this thesis have further demonstrated the explanatory power of cognitive linguistics to interlanguage variation. New perspectives and thoughts have been provided for the research of cognitive linguistics and SLA as well as the amalgamation and development of the two fields in the future. What’s more, certain implications have also been brought to second language teaching and learning. At last, the limitations of the present research have been put forward in order to make contributions for further studies.