The Study Of Potential Complement Composed By Simple Directional Verb In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

When facing the structures like "chi de shang", "chi de xia" and "chi de qi", even the high level Chinese learners still feel difficult to discriminate these structures. The potential complements composed by simple directional verbs have similar structures and differences of their meanings are not very significant. Liu Yuehua (2001) also pointed out that in "V de/Bu C" structure C can not be simply equal to directional complements or resultative complements. All these features cause the students’ difficulties in understanding and using. Students tend to be slightly afraid and want to avoid using potential complements. How to explain potential complements composed by simple directional verbs more clearly is the problem this thesis would like to solve.First the author did a summary of the relevant literature. Based on the previous research results, the author decided to choose "shang, xia and qi" as an example. Then the author analyze on Chinese native speakers corpus. Using the theory of cognitive linguistics-the image schema theory and metaphor theory of Lakoff to explore the formation mechanism of the metaphorical meaning and the metonymic meaning of the structures.After clarifying the meanings of potential complements composed by simple directional verbs "shang, xia and qi", the author takes senior students of Sinology Department of the Leiden University in the Netherlands as a case study sample. Trying to analysis their errors in using potential complements. The author also compares that how the textbooks the students used (New Practical Chinese Reader and Integrated Chinese) explain potential complements. Then according to the corpus analysis result, the author designs the questionnaire. Substitution and omission are the two most common errors. Based on the interlanguage analysis the author points out the pedagogical grammar order of potential complements composed by simple directional verbs and common collocation. The author utilizes the order and collocation in teaching design. It is excepted that the teaching design can be regard as a reference for the practical teaching and benefit for the future studies.