Bei-construction And Its Acquisition As A Second Language From The Perspective Of Situation Type

This thesis is a study on Bei-construction and its acquisition as a second language from the perspective of verbs' situation type,focusing on the verbs and the delimiting elements in Bei-constructions.Firstly,200 Bei-constructions extracted from BCC were studied in the ontology research.The verbs and delimiting elements in these 200 Bei-constructions were labeled,counted and classified according to the theory of situation type.Based on the statistics,analyses on the distribution of four types of verbs and delimiting elements as well as their collocation were made.The findings of ontology study:First,the difficulty of four types of verbs being used in Bei-construction is different.The order is state verb,accomplishment verb,achievement verb and activity verb from the hardest to the easiest.State verbs are hardly used in Bei-constructions.Second,verbs with weaker telic feature need to be collocated with more complex delimiting elements which are more telic to form Bei-constructions.The findings of' the ontology study on Chinese Bei-construction provide some inspirations for the study on its acquisition as a second language.Therefore.224 Bei-constructions extracted from HSK were used to conduct the acquisition study.In the acquisition study.not only the distribution of verbs and delimiting elements but also the accuracy of the sentences built up by these three types of verbs which could be used in Bei-construction was analyzed,Acquisition errors related to the verbs and delimiting elements were summarized and analyzed.The result of' the acquisition study is that the acquisition difficulty order of these three types of verbs is accomplishment verb,activity verb and achievement verb from the hardest to the easiest.Acquisition errors are mainly omission and abundance of delinmiting elements as well as the misuse of the verbs.This thesis suggests that the sentence structure and the semantic features of Bei-construction should be combined in teaching and more attention should be paid to the teaching of the VP part in Bei-constructions.