An Empirical Research On Theacquisition Of English Caused-motion Construction

English caused-motion construction is a typical argument structure construction,which is a form-meaning pair and bears its own meaning. This thesis attempts toanalyze caused-motion construction on the aspects of the classification, semanticconstraint and the cognitive meaning under the framework of Goldberg’s study,through questionnaire and email interview to study Chinese learners’ acquisitioncondition on English caused-motion construction so as to bring some enlightenmentfor learning and teaching English.There are300subjects of three different proficiency levels involved in thisresearch. The subjects are required to do test papers and SPSS17.0is adopted to testthe significance of the data collected.The results show that the overall acquisition condition tends to increase with theimprovement of English levels. The subjects have a relative high degree ofidentification on the central sense of English caused-motion construction, while lesssensitive to the semantic constraints. For the understanding of non-conventionalcaused-motion construction, the students at the low level tend to be more influencedby the mother tongue, but the students at the advanced level by the target language.Moreover, the low level interprets English sentences mainly by verbs, while theadvanced levels by construction.Some practical implications are given based on the results: firstly, we suggestputting the construction grammar into the grammar books so that the students canhave a systematic understanding of it. Secondly, the teachers should adopt multiplemethods to teach and optimize their teaching orientations. Lastly, it gives someenlightenments for the learners of different language proficiency.