Acquisition Of English Locative Constructions

With the development of construction grammar, more and more linguists devote themselves to the construction study theoretically and empirically. Studies on English locative constructions gradually attract scholars’ attention, which mainly focus on the theoretical discussions rather than empirical studies. What’s more, the research methods, testing materials as well as the results in these empirical studies are under debate, which calls for further discussion.This thesis is an empirical study about the acquisition of English locative constructions. 60 second-year English major students were evenly divided into control and experimental groups. Then, an acquisition training of English locative constructions was conducted on the learners in experimental group under the guidance for three weeks. However, the students in control group were only accessible to the training materials with no guidance. The two groups were required to complete the testing materials of broad-range rules and narrow-range rules for 6 times during the whole experimental period. The testing materials for broad-range rules are multiple choice tasks, and the testing materials for narrow-range rules are grammatical judgment tasks. After that, the collected data were analyzed by SPSS16.0.The experimental results show that the overall cognitive levels of the two groups are not high compared to the native English speakers, but the participants are much more open to the figure pattern constructions than the ground pattern constructions.After the training, the average grades of the experimental group are higher than the control group. Though some learners of experimental group are not familiar with the English locative verbs in the deferred test one month later, they can guess the semantics of the locative verbs according to the semantics of the constructions, and further classify the locative verbs, and then give the right answer. It is shown that the learners in experimental group acquire the locative constructions by comprehension rather than short-term memory and the training model benefit them for the acquisition.