A Corpus-based Analysis Of The Deviation In The Use Of Causative Construction By Chinese EFL Learners

Construction Grammar as a theoretical pattern of Cognitive Linguistics has achieved great development since 1980s.Goldberg,the founder of Construction Grammar claims that the basic units of language are constructions,which are defined as "form-meaning pairs".She holds that the linguistic system is a continuum of successively abstract constructions,such as morphemes,words,idioms as well as complex patterns.Construction Grammar attaches importance to constructional meaning and also researches on language acquisition in this perspective.Scholars has done extensive studies home and abroad,for example,Gilquin summarized the different meanings of several causative constructions through a corpus-based study.However,there aren't many researches on the use or acquisition of certain construction in second language learning scope.For Chinese EFL learners,the ingrained mother tongue in their mind,the objective differences between the two languages and the traditional English class,which emphasizes too much on verbs and sentence constitutes while ignores the similar patterns and constructions in two languages,all bring about much difficulties in their second language learning.In this setting,by using the collostructional analysis,this thesis studies the actual use and acquisition of the typical causative construction[X Make Y Vinf]in Chinese learners'writings under the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar,making an attempt to provide some suggestions for second language learning and teaching.Taking CLEC and COCA as the data source,the thesis retrieve all the qualified causative construction in the form of[X Make Y Vinf]and manually pick off the unqualified ones.After that,frequency analysis is applied to calculate the overall occurrences of the target construction and its verb collexemes and then collostructional analysis is applied to get the association strength of the verb in a given slot and the target construction.This thesis aims to investigate two questions:1.In what aspects does the use of causative constructions by Chinese English learners differ from that by English native speakers?2.What are the influences of Chinese learners' English proficiency on their use of causative constructions?The major findings are:1.Chinese English learners rely on this construction to express the causation meaning meanwhile show a lack in the variety of the collexemes of the construction as well as the overall output of high frequency collexemes;Chinese English learners show preference to two kinds of collexemes of this construction,verbs of actions and verbs of psychological processes while underuse collexemes belonging to verbs of states and physiological processes.Besides,the actual choice of verbs of states also shows deviation;2.Learners with higher proficiency produce a limited but idiomatic causative constructions with less mistakes,while learner with lower English produce more of the constructions and with more infelicitous or non-standard patterns.According to this study,it is suggested that the concept of the construction should be developed in second language teaching and classroom teaching should pay attention to constructional meaning instead of just emphasizing words or grammar constitutions.Moreover,avoid negative transfer of mother tongue by increasing the amount of language input as well as comparing the similar constructions between English and Chinese.