A Study On The Degree Classification Of Verbs Of Mental State And L2 Acquisition

Verbs of mental state is a very important class of psychological verbs. According to our reading relevant literature and accumulation of the usual teaching, we found that there were some difficulties and problems for the foreign students to learn the extent of the verbs of mental state. We distinguished three types of verbs of mental state by using corpus statistics, evaluation and questionnaire, and basing on these three types, we studied the acquisition and error distribution of the foreign students.According to the achievements of the predecessors, we checked two claasic Chinese book and filtered 83 verbs of mental state. Through the evaluation of Chinese native speakers, we divided all the verbs of mental state into three categories:continuous degree one, non- continuous degree one and no degree one, and we also discussed the meaning and characteristics of each category. Based on the three categories of the verbs of mental state, we designed a questionnaire for the foreign students to study their acquisition by analyzing the factors between Chinese level,types of verbs of mental state and degree of the extent, and we got the following conclusions:(1) The learning of different types of verbs of mental state are significant: the acquisition of no degree type is the best, while non- continuous degree is the worst.Between two kinds of Chinese levels, the students of high level have the difference,however, the middle levels ones don't have.(2) The learning of different degree of verbs of mental state are significant: the acquisition of the second highest type is the best, while the highest type is the worst.The students of high level and middle level both show the differences.(3) The learning of different degree of verbs of mental state for each types are significant:for he continuous degree ones and non- continuous degree ones, the acquisition of the second highest type is the best, and the highest type is the worst; for the no degree ones, highest type is the best, and the second highest type is the worst.(4) The learning of different types of verbs of mental state for each kind of degrees are significant:for the learning the lowest ones, the acquisition of the no degree type is better than other two types and the non- continuous types are the worst;for the highest ones, the no degree type is the best and the continuous degree type is the worst; for the second highest ones, the three types are comparable.At the same time, we analyzed the two kinds of errors,the reasoning errors and defect errors we found: generally speaking, the defect of their knowledge system is main cause of their errors when they judge the degree of the verbs of the mental state.