English Psych Causative Verb Acquisition Based On Event Structure Theory

English psych causative verbs are used to describe mental activities.Like Chinese psych causative verbs,they have two kinds of structures: lexical causative structure and syntactic causative structure.However,these two languages have their different emphasis.And owing to the mother tongue transfer,Chinese second language learners tend to excessively use syntactic causative structure in learning English psych causative verbs and tend to make psych predicate mistakes,and this brings great difficulty in their learning English psych causative verbs.Through experiments,Farrar et al.found that the knowledge of event structure is closely related with language acquisition,and it is beneficial for language learners who have mature event structure knowledge to acquire language.Therefore,it is plausible to explore college students' acquisition of psych causative verbs based on event structure.In recent years,both foreign and domestic researchers have investigated Chinese students learning English psych causative verbs,but there are few empirical studies which apply event structure to psych causative verb acquisition.This empirical study,based on Pustejovsky's study of event structure around the verb,focuses on English psych causative verbs,emphasizes their event structures by learning the verbs' meanings and usages so as to investigate the acquisition of psych causative verbs.This study is intended to answer the following three research questions:1)Which teaching method is more effective in improving the acquisition of psych causative verbs,traditional teaching method or teaching method based on event structure?2)Which causative structure is used more frequently by the two groups,the lexical causative structure or the syntactic causative structure?3)How about the learning effects of the acquisition of psych causative verbs under teaching method based on event structure?The present empirical study consists of four parts,including pre-test,instructive treatment,immediate post-test and delayed post-test.The participants are freshmen from two parallel classes in Qindao College of Qingdao Technological University in Qingdaocity,Shandong Province,China.There are 30 students in each class,and there is no significant difference in age and gender between the two classes.One of the classes is randomly chosen as the experimental group and the other one is as the control group.One week before the instruction,the pre-test is carried out and aims at assuring that the participants in two groups are at the same level of the mastery of target vocabularies before receiving different instructive treatments.The treatments last for 3 weeks,during which the experimental group receives teaching method based on event structure and the control group receives traditional teaching method.And the immediate post-test is conducted after the instructive treatments come to an end.Four weeks after the immediate post-test,the delayed post-test is conducted.The specific questions in all the tests,including pre-test,immediate post-test and delayed post-test,are totally different from each other,but the target items and question types remain the same with similar test difficulty and complexity.The experiment results show that in immediate post-test,both teaching methods are conducive to improving students' performance in psych causative verb acquisition without significant difference in their performance in syntactic causative structure,but that the experimental group gets higher scores than the control group does in terms of the lexical causative structure.In the delayed post-test,the experimental group's average scores,including the scores of syntactic and lexical causative structures,do not significantly decrease compared with those in the immediate post-test,which indicates that both traditional and teaching method based on event structures contribute to the acquisition of psych causative verbs,but teaching method based on event structure is more conducive to students' learning lexical causative structure and the long-term effect is significant.Based on the experiment results and analysis,some teaching inspirations are gained as follows: the acquisition of psych causative verbs and the lexical causative structure should be preceded by understanding the expressions of English native speakers and their way of thinking behind the expression habit;the students should increase and strengthen the understanding input of the target vocabulary structure which will help to arouse their attention to vocabulary expression.This is more conducive to English psych causative verbs acquisition.Although this empirical study has done some positive attempts,there are still someweaknesses due to some conditions limited,such as single sample and the short time interval between the immediate and delayed post-test.It is hoped that the future study will make up these deficiencies and continue to study psych causative verbs teaching more deeply and more comprehensively.