A Cognitive Analysis Of Chinese English Learners' Acquisition Of English Psych Causative Verb

Vocabulary is one of the constituent parts of language, so a great deal of attention has been focused recently on lexical acquisition in Second Language Acquisition(SLA). Psych causative verbs, such as interest, concern, surprise, encourage and so on, as a categorization of psych verbs, have been a big concern of many researchers both home and abroad. Previous studies on psych causative verbs are mainly conducted in two aspects: linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. In linguistics, most studies are carried out in two dimensions: neurolinguistics and cognitive linguistics(CL). Research of neurolinguistics focuses on operation system of brain of all-stage students(especially that of children) during the acquisition process of psych causative verbs and what role UG plays in acquisition. CL attempts to give a cognitive illustration of psych causative verbs. Emphasis is primarily laid on semantic feature, function and interaction between syntactic and semantic structures. In SLA, comparative studies are continuously made between native speaker and English learner to find out that L1 transfer plays a startling part in SLA. However, there still exist a lot of insufficiencies in the study of psych causative verbs. Grounded on the previous studies, this dissertation hence aims at probing into misuses of psych causative verbs in writing English by Chinese English learners and tries to interpret the cognitive reasons for these misuses from both linguistic perspective and cognitive perspective(especially construction grammar, Cx G), in an attempt to provide some implications in teaching and learning of psych causative verbs.Driven by British National Corpus(BNC) and Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC), this dissertation randomly chooses top six psych causative verbs most frequently misused by native speakers of English from BNC as research subject, collects misuses of psych causative verbs in use, identifies and classifies them, trying to give answers to the following three research questions:1. What are the misuses in Chinese English learners' writing?2. What is the distribution of psych causative verbs and the misuses in St2, St3*St4 and St5*St6?3. What are the causes for psych causative verb misuses in Chinese English learners' writing? And what are the causes for the different distributions in St2, St3*St4 and St5*St6?With the assistance of a pool of data, several major findings are discussed and presented as follows:Firstly, concerning misuses of psych causative verbs, there are roughly seven types according to frequency and type of misuses listed as follows: first, misuse of the third person singular and tense of psych causative verb; second, misuse of a psych causative verb's set phrase; third, misuse of part of speech; fourth, mismatch of psych causative verb to meaning; fifth, inappropriate preposition collocation with psych causative verb; sixth, misuse of voice and overuse of periphrastic construction; seventh, insufficiency of elaboration and variety of verbs. The first is about misuse to tense; the third, fifth and sixth are attributed to mood; the others are due to poor cognition of Psych Causative Construction, which are most common and enough attention should be paid to in language teaching and learning.Secondly, the distributions of misuses of psych causative verbs are different in three sub-corpora: middle and high school learners(St2), non-English majors(St3*St4) and English majors(St5* St6). According to the data collected, learners with lower English proficiency share a higher misuse rate compared with those with high English proficiency. In linguistics, this is due to distinction of language and mother tongue influence; in cognition, it is likely to be poorness of recognition of Psych Causative Construction.Thirdly, causes for the misuses of psych causative verbs can possibly be studied from perspectives of cognition and linguistics. Linguistic perspective includes interlingual misuses and intralingual misuses. The main reason for intralingual misuses is negative transfer of Chinese; interlingual causes are insufficient semantic elaboration of psych causative verbs. Cognitive dimension suggests the principal reason for misuses of psych causative verbs is the loss of causative meaning, namely, students obtain the meaning of psych causative verb but it is not sufficient and they are not able to put into practice the direct causative structure(lexicalized causative verb) with so much proficiency as periphrastic causative structure(MAKE-construction) in the process of usage. With regard to the different distributions among three sub-corpora, as we explain in the aspect of Cx G, learners with lower English proficiency acquire the forms of psych causative verbs but lack the ability to acquire the paring of form and meaning.Fourthly, conducting an analysis from both linguistic and cognitive(especially Cx G) perspectives can in a part enrich relevant cognitive theories previously used.