A Corpus-driven Comparative Study Of Verb Valency Patterns

Corpus-driven phraseology claims that pattern grammar is employed to systematically describe structure and provides a novel perspective of language research.Pattern grammar,however,merely places its emphasis on parts of speech;no sufficient attention thus is given to syntactic function.Valency grammar focuses on verbs and explores the dependency among language elements in the field of pattern,semantics and syntax.And it has attracted many researchers in corpus linguistics at home and abroad.Zhen Fengchao and Yang Feng(2015)put forward valency pattern,a set of corpus-driven system,utilized to depict verb valency structure.This system combines pattern grammar with valency grammar and further compensates for the limitation of ignoring syntactic function.Moreover,the system clearly reflects the dependency between core lexical items and their dominated lexical items and bears theoretical significance and practical value in language teaching to a large degree.However,insufficient importance is attached to valency grammar in the field of foreign language at home.The present study is undertaken to compare L2 learners and native speakers’ performances on the verb valency patterns used in the TECCL corpus and COCA by taking provide,happen and lack as cases and further explore the syntactic and semantic features of the node words.And the present study mainly answers the following three questions:(1)What are the features of valency patterns in the use of high-frequency lexical verbs by Chinese learners and native speakers?(2)What are the misuses concerning valency patterns of the node words in the TECCL corpus?(3)What cause the misuse of high-frequency lexical verbs by Chinese learners?The results obtained from the present study reveal that with regard to the valency patterns,Chinese learners differ from native speakers both in structure and frequency.In addition,they misuse and underuse some valency patterns.Specifically,as for node word provide,L2 learners employ less valency patterns than native speakers and misuse valency patterns.To be more specific,L2 learners tend to utilize the trivalency pattern of provide and employ less bivalency patterns than native speakers in terms of structure type.As for the node word happen,L2 learners perform poorly on the pattern of Sub be V,which is called unaccusative verb overpassivization.Another point needed to be mentioned is that L2 learners employ less valency pattern than native speakers with respect to frequency.As for lack,native speakers are inclined to use its noun pattern while L2 learners misuse that as verb pattern in that lack belongs to verb-noun heterosemy.This can be possibly accounted for by learners’ deficiency of language input and mother tongue transfer.The present study combines valency grammar with pattern grammar by adopting corpus-driven approach and describes the valency pattern of high-frequency verbs.In a nutshell,the present study makes contributions to providing L2 learners with reference to have a better command of valency pattern and to enlightening foreign language teaching.