The Acquisition Of English Ditransitive Constructions By Chinese EFL Learners

The previous studies on the ditransitive construction can mainly be divided into three approaches:the transformational approach, the structural approach and the cognitive approach. This thesis conducts the research to the ditransitive construction from the perspective of construction grammar based on the cognitive approach. The construction grammar provides a new understanding to the essence of language, and shows a strong explanatory power for many previous unexplained language structures. The construction grammar is a usage-based theory, which can reflect the process of language acquisition more reasonably and it will have a far-reaching influence on language teaching.The present study adopts Goldberg’s Construction Grammar to investigate the acquisition of English ditransitive constructions by Chinese EFL learners. More specifically, this paper divides the English ditransitive verbs into three types: overt-giving verbs, covert-giving verbs and non-giving verbs. This research investigates the situation of Chinese EFL learners’use of the three types of English ditransitive verbs and the two types of English ditransitive constructions into which the ditransitive verbs enter, that is, the prepositional dative construction and the central ditransitive construction.In order to make a micro analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English ditransitive constructions, the following two key questions are raised:(1) What types of English ditransitive verbs do Chinese EFL learners use when they express the "giving" meaning?(2) Would the Chinese EFL learners prefer to choose the ditransitive construction or the prepositional dative construction when the similar "giving" meaning is expressed?Two questionnaires which include three types of ditransitive verbs were adopted to collect the information on the acquisition of English ditransitive construction by Chinese EFL learners. Questionnaire One was a grammatical judgment and Questionnaire Two required the participants to answer6multiple-choice questions.100Non-English major second-year students participated in the experiment. Besides the performance of grammatical judgment and multiple-choice questions tasks, all the participants were asked to give their judgmental reasons which may provide more evidence to our research questions. All the data were analyzed through SPSS19.0.The research results show that there are significant differences in Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of the three types of English ditransitive verbs and the two types of English ditransitive constructions. Specifically, the non-giving verbs are the most difficult to acquire and the covert-giving verbs are the easiest for Chinese EFL learners, while the acquisition of overt-giving verbs is in between. In other words, Chinese learners’ acquisition of covert-giving verbs is better than that of non-giving verbs and overt-giving verbs. In addition, the research results show that Chinese EFL learners show a preference for the prepositional dative construction over the ditransitive construction. It indicates that the acquisition of the prepositional dative construction is better than that of the central English ditransitive construction.The present research has practical significance in its purpose to improve Chinese EFL learners’learning of English ditransitive constructions and dative constructions.