A Study On The Acquisition Of English Causative Constructions By Chinese College Students

The "CAUSATIVE" concept is a common semantic category in human language.The causative relationship linguistically represents the human cognition of the cause-effect relationship existing between the entities in the world.This study intends to investigate the acquisition of English causative constructions by Chinese college students in order to make a better sense of how an efficient acquisition is obtained and how an inefficient acquisition is generated.This study aims to probe into the differentiations of the causative construction acquisition in different grades of college students as subjects.Based on Construction Grammar,Slobin's “Thinking for Speaking” Hypothesis and Corder's Error Analysis Hypothesis,this study will analyze the collected data to pin down the effects of cognitive factors on the distinct causative construction acquisition by Chinese college students.This study is going to answer the following questions:(1)To what extent do Chinese college students acquire English causative constructions?(2)What are the typical errors in the Chinese college students' acquisition of English causative construction? For the research purpose,this study set out to find out the deep-rooted factors affecting the efficiency in acquiring English causative construction.Based on the analysis of the collected data from the designed tests and questionnaires on causative constructions in English,this study has summed up the following findings.1)As far as the English learners are concerned,the English proficiency level is directly proportional to the acquisition of English causative construction.The higher the level of English learners is,the more types of causative constructions they acquire with the higher accuracy of acquisition.On the contrary,the lower learner's English level results in the acquisition of fewer construction types,together with the lower accuracy of acquisition.When it comes to the types of English causative constructions,the acquisition effect of SVOC causative constructions is generally better than the acquisition of SVO causative constructions.If the causative construction in Chinese is different from that in English,Chinese college students have great trouble in acquiring the causative SVO in English.Even in terms of the causative SVOC pattern in English,they are confronted with the greatest challenge when it comes to the causative SVOC representation of an idiomatic causative predication that always activates the overgeneralization of some common intransitive predicates in Chinese learners of English.2)The subjects' acquisition levels are differentiated due to their different levels of proficiency in English: the language task type has a close relationship with the level of language acquisition.In language comprehension and language production,English learners show their respective correspondent levels.In other words,the correct rate of language comprehension of the Chinese learners of English mirrors the levels of the English proficiency in the Chinese learners;on the contrary,the correct rate is lower.In terms of the SVO pattern and the SVO pattern in English causative constructions,this study focuses on the three typical errors in the participants' acquisition of English causative constructions: mistaking the explicit complement for adverbial,omission of the patientive reflexive pronoun in the causative construction,and failure to acquire the idiomatic causative construction.In this study,the acquisition failures in acquiring causative construction in English have been deeply probed for the factors characteristic of the acquisition strategy and intuition in Chinese college students.Deeply influenced by their inadequate knowledge of English causative constructions and their motivation of the typical causative patterning in Chinese,the participants preferred using the MAKE causative patterning in most cases.The typical errors in the acquisition of English causative constructions in English provided very useful and helpful clues to the learning strategies employed by the participants.This study is significant in that the regularity and common characteristics in the course of English causative construction acquisition are expected to enable Chinese college students to efficiently acquire causative constructions in English by overcoming the possible negative language transfer or interlanguage fossilization.