Investigating The Psych Causative Verbs In Chinese College Students' Spoken English

Psych verbs are reflections of human psychological activities in language,and belong to the kind of verbs describing human psychological changes or mental states.According to the designated positions of the thematic role of Experiencer,Levin(1993:38)and Pesetsky(1995:52)classify psych verbs into Experiencer subject(ES)verbs,and Experiencer object(EO)verbs,the former are known as psych stative verbs(PSVs),and the latter as psych causative verbs(PCVs).The apparently arbitrary mapping of theta roles onto syntactic positions exerts trouble to many English learners.This thesis is based on Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SECCL)constructed by Qiufang Wen et al..The two reference corpora are the sub spoken English corpora of COCA for American English and BNC for British English,which are used to draw a more global picture of English use of psych causative verbs.According to Zhang Jingyu's classification,psych causative verbs are divided into shock-group,satisfy-group and worry-group verbs.The study focuses on the contrastive interlanguage analysis of the use of three typical psych causative verbs by Chinese English major college students,compared to native speakers in oral contexts.The results are further analyzed by Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model.The thesis aims to answer four questions:(1)What are the differences in the acquisition of the three different group of PCVs by Chinese L2 learners?(2)Do Chinese learners overuse or underuse psych causative verbs and its related psych predicates(periphrastic causatives,V-ed forms and V-ing forms)compared to native speakers in spoken English and how?(3)Compared to native speakers,are there any other obvious collocations overused or misused by Chinese L2 learners?(4)Are the results in accordance with the predictions in Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model?If not,what are the possible reasons?The study has five findings.First of all,according to semantic salience hierarchy model,Chinese learners tend to underuse lexical causative verbs and overuse the periphrastic constructions.However,results show no significant difference in the use of lexical causative verbs and periphrastic causative constructions between native speakers and Chinese learners.Second,among the examined five related structures,stative psych structures are grammatically correctly used by Chinese learners but significantly overused,which confirms to the rule of Semantic Transparency of English Psych Predicates in Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model.Third,among the three classes of PCVs,worry-group PC Vs represented by worry in this study is the less successfully acquired,which is attributed to that worry can be used both as a stative verb and as a causative verb bearing zero CAUS.In this case,zero CAUS is less salient in the causative forms of stem-sharing alternating verbs like worry than non-alternating verbs like frighten.Fourth,results show a high frequency of misuse of V-ing predicates.Compared to zero-derived OE verbs,V-ing adjectives have affixation-ing,which highlights the part-of-speech but blurs the syntactically relevant meaning component zero CAUS.The last one is that Chinese L2 learners tend to overuse the pattern of "light verb+ noun" for it is grammatically easier and cognitively in accordance with the first language habit of expressing emotion in a stative way.