The Empirical Research On The Acquisition Of English Psych Causative Verbs By Chinese L2Learners

Psych verbs is used for the description of people’s mental activities. According to different expression of argument, Pesetsky (1995) divided psych verbs into subject experiencer (SE) and object experiencer (OE). In the examples of Alice likes the movie and The movie pleases Alice, the two sentences express similar meaning but differ in syntactic structure with former Experiencer in the position of subject whereas latter Experiencer in the position of object. Besides, this inverted problem poses a great difficulty for L2learners in the acquisition of psych verbs. It is assumed that OE verbs are more difficult to acquire because there is an implicit CAUS in them rather than explicit CAUS such as affix and Make construction. Make construction is widely used in Chinese, whereas lexical form is commonly produced in English, which also has an influence on the acquisition of psych causative verbs for Chinese L2learners. Zhang (2001) divided OE verbs into smaller groups according to syntactic features of Chinese and English psych verbs:Shock-class, Satisfy-class and Worry-class, among which Worry-class will be the focus of present study.Based on the theory of language transfer and learners’ sensitivity to zero CAUS, the study conducted the experiment on the three different levels of learners for the purpose of finding the problems they may confront in the learning psych verbs. The research focuses on the following questions:(1) Do college English learners have difficulty in learning SE and OE verbs?(2) What is college English learners’ preference in producing causative expression in using OE verbs?(3) For different levels of students, are there any differences in the acquisition of OE verbs?The findings are discussed in three aspects. First, language transfer most probably happens in the elementary stage of learning psych causative verbs because students in the elementary level have much more problems than those in the advanced level. Second, learners are not very sensitive to implicit causative feature, thus zero CAUS is a great barrier for L2learner to acquire psych causative verbs. Besides, their preferences of using OE verbs are different according to different levels. At last, high English learners have higher sensitivity to recognize the zero CAUS and are less influenced by native language compared with low English learners.