A Corpus-Based Study On The Use Of English Psych Causative Verbs In College Students

Psych verbs have become one of the most hot topics in theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics since 1970 s. Psych verbs are reflections of human psychological activities in language, and belong to the kind of verbs describing human psychological activities or mental states with two arguments. According to the designated positions of the thematic role of Experiencer, Pesetsky(1995: 52) and Levin(1993: 38) classify psych verbs into experiencer subject(ES) verbs, and experiencer object(EO) verbs, the former known as psych stative verbs(PSVs), and the latter known as psych causative verbs(PCVs). The apparently arbitrary mapping of theta roles onto syntactic positions exerts troubles to English learners. Psych verb error belongs to a kind of "global error", because they seriously affect the overall organization of language and hinder normal communication. There exist significant differences in semantic and syntactic structures between most English psych causative verbs and their counterparts in Chinese. Psych causative verbs are important components in English vocabulary, the mastery of which is of vital importance to the grasp of English.With the rapid development of computer, corpus has become an important tool of language study, and has been commonly used in various fields of language research. The thesis is based on Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC) and two native speakers’ corpus: Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) and British National Corpus(BNC), and adopts contrastive analysis(CA) approach and retrieval software Wordsmith 6.0. According to Zhang Jingyu’s classification, psych causative verbs are divided into shock-class, satisfy-class and worry-class verbs. The study focuses on the use of the three typical psych causative verbs by Chinese non-English major college students. And it aims at four questions:(1) Do Chinese non-English major college students overuse or underuse psych causative verbs compared to native speakers?(2) Is there a significant difference in the choice of causativization patterns, lexical or periphrastic causatives, between Chinese non-English major college students and native English speakers?(3) What are the deviances in the use of psych causative verbs concerning Chinese non-English major college students compared with native English speakers?(4) What are the causes of the deviant uses?There are four findings:(1) Chinese non-English major college students show no significant differences in the use of psych causative verb, shock, while these Chinese students tend to overuse the other two: satisfy and worry.(2) Compared to native speakers, Chinese students underuse lexical causatives and overuse the syntactic structure of PCVs.(3) There exists difference in collocations of the three verbs between Chinese non-English major college students and English native speakers. The datas show learners’ bad mastery of prepositions. What’s more, learners use worry about far more frequently than English native speakers.(4) No significant difference is found in term of their A-ed forms, but learners underuse A-ing forms of the three verbs.Learners’ deviant uses of English psych causative verbs can be explained by: difference in cognitive style between Chinese native speakers and English native speakers, overgeneralization of Chinese positive transfer, Chinese negative transfer, insufficient English input, and the strategy of avoidance in the learning process. The end of the thesis provides practical implications for English PCV learning and teaching: strengthening awareness of zero CAUS, attaching importance to prepositions, making good use of corpora, and overcoming fear of making mistakes.