An Empirical Study On Acquisition Of English Preposition By Chinese L2Learners Under Principled-Polysemy Model

As a frequently used preposition in English, with creates great learning difficulties for Chinese EFL learnersfor its polysemous semantics. However, research on with has long been ignored by researchers. Systematic andprecise semantic analyses are rare and little is known as to how L2learners acquire English preposition with.The present thesis aims to conduct a semantic analysis of with and investigate the acquisition of multiple sensesof with by Chinese EFL learners.More specifically, the present thesis is intended to address the following two research questions:1. DoChinese EFL learners build up a semantic network of “with”? If they do, what the semantic network is like?2.What developmental path do Chinese EFL learners follow in their semantic acquisition of English preposition“with”?Semantic analysis and semantic network of with are first conducted by the present thesis within theframework of principled-polysemy model proposed by cognitive linguists Tyler&Evans (2003). And then itinvestigates acquisition of with by Chinese EFL learners on the basis of the above semantic analysis.According to the criteria of principled-polysemy and previous semantic analyses, the present study classifiessemantics of with into nine categories and discusses identification diagnostic for each sense. Results of semanticanalysis indicate that “Spatial proximity” sense is its proto sense, followed by “Instrument”,“Accompaniment”,and “Temporal-sense”.To investigate how Chinese EFL learners acquire the multiple senses of with, a pilot study upon SWECCLcorpus was first conducted to describe the frequency distribution of senses of with. Then a Semantic JudgmentTask and a Translation Close Task were designed to investigate the learners’ interpretation and acquisition ofsenses of with.100participants of different proficiency levels were recruited in the empirical experiments. Data ofSemantic Judgment Task and Translation Close Task were performed employing SPSS13.0, results of whichdiscussed the two research questions in the present study.The results show that1) the subjects haven’t formed a semantic network for with;2）Acquisition of with byChinese EFL learns follow “Instrument”,“Accompaniment”,“Temporal-sense”,“Against”, and then “Despite”sense path except its proto sense “Spatial-sense”, which correlates to principles of Prototype Theory. In addition,the present study found that ignorance of semantic analysis and discrimination complexity of semantics of withare two important reasons of learning difficulties of with for Chinese EFL learners.