A Corpus-based Exploration Of Behaviors Of Psych-verbs By Chinese English Major Learners

Psych-verbs,as an important subcategory of verbs,are used to express the state or change of human psychology.They are frequently used in daily life.Based on the corpora of WECCL and FROWN,with the help of Antconc,Foxpro,BFSU Colligator and SPSS,this thesis focuses on three behaviors of 348 psych-verbs,including the frequency distribution,colligation,and collocation between Chinese English majors and native speakers.Quantitative and qualitative analysis are applied to find out the features and problems of the use of psych-verbs by Chinese English majors.Therefore,they can know about the discrepancy,understand and master psych-verbs better.According to the overall distribution of 348 psych-verbs in the two corpora,it is found that there is significant difference on the selection of individual verbs in the two corpora.Chinese English major learners use fewer types of psych-verbs and overuse what they have mastered.Also,compared with the psych-verbs whose experiencers are objects(EO psych-verbs),they tend to use psych-verbs whose experiencers are subjects(ES psych-verbs).There are significant differences on the frequency distributions of EO psych-verbs and ES psych-verbs respectively in the two corpora.Top 20 EO psych-verbs and top 10 ES psych-verbs are investigated in terms of their colligations.Result reveals that the significantly different use of a verb results from the different use of one or two certain kinds of colligations but not of all.ES psych-verbs are better used on colligation compared with EO psych-verbs by Chinese English major learners.Some typical colligations are then selected to investigate the collocation under them.It is found that there is lack of diversity on collocates in WECCL.There are few shared collocates under the same colligation of a verb in the two corpora.Chinese English major students have the tendency to use animate collocates.And their use of psych-verbs has the characteristic of colloquial style.The above results may be due to the familiarity of certain psych-verbs and the influence of fixed topic in WECCL.Additionally,semantic transfer,cultural transfer,and different cognitive styles of Chinese and native speakers contribute to the results.