A Cognitive Study On The Acquisition Of English Caused-Motion Construction Of Learners With Different English Proficiency Levels

As a very important component in the Construction Grammar, the English Caused-Motion Construction is more than an important semantic concept, which also expresses the basic experience in human's life. Its structural form is "Sub. V. Obj. Ob1." (among this form, V stands for a non-state verb and Ob1. is a prepositional phrase which refers to the direction or path in this construction"); its syntactic form is "NP1+V.+NP2+PP", whose central and typical sense is that "X causes Y to move Zpath". The meaning or sense of the English Caused-Motion Construction cannot be predicted from the components or the combination of different components as well as the other constructions in the Construction Grammar. Construction is a from-meaning pair, expressing its meaning from the construction itself, which is the same with the English Caused-Motion Construction. It has more than one fixed sense, the sense of which is made up of one typical and central sense as well as four other senses that are extended from the typical one.Based on the theoretical frameworks of the Construction Grammar that is proposed by Goldberg, the Conceptual Blending/Integration Theory that is proposed by Fauconnier and Turner as well as the Grammatical Blending proposed by Mandelblit, a modified version of the Conceptual Blending/Integration Theory, this study is conducted with the help of questionnaire and interview, which aims to study the following questions:1. Which kind of verb is the most difficult for the Chinese speakers when they are comprehending and processing the English Caused-Motion Construction? And which kind of verb is the easiest for the Chinese learners when they are comprehending and processing the English Caused-Motion Construction?2. Among five senses of the English Caused-Motion Construction, are there any differences and similarities in the comprehending process among the three groups of participants?3. What are the factors that affect the English learners whose native language is Chinese when comprehending the English Caused-Motion Construction?4. How do the Chinese non-English major participants understand and comprehend the non-conventional English Caused-Motion Construction?The main discoveries of this study are listed as follows:1) There are some similarities among the participants with the different proficiency levels of English. The participants comprehend the English caused-motion sentences with the most typical and central sense the best; when comprehending the English caused-motion sentence with the sense of the enablement of motion, the participants need the most cognitive effort. When comprehending the other three sense of caused-motion construction, the participants need the medium cognitive effort.2) The advanced level English learners seem to comprehend the English Caused-Motion Construction with the untypical senses more easily than the intermediate level learners and the low level learners.3) The reasons why the English learners whose native language is Chinese need different cognitive effort when comprehending the different senses of the English Caused-Motion Construction are mainly that, the negative transfer of the native language, overgeneralization and the negative influence of the Chinese thinking patterns and the direct Chinese translation.4) The Chinese non-English major learners need more cognitive effort to comprehend the untypical senses than the English majors. They tend to comprehend the English Caused-Motion Construction by the major verbs, the verb collation as well as the translation of the sentence while the advanced learners tend to comprehend the sentences by constructions.