Building Up The Lexical-semantic Relation Of English Placing Verbs In English

Verbs of placing are high frequency words in both Chinese and English.Chinese learners have been found to fail to acquire a diversified vocabulary of placing verbs and have difficulties in using English placing verbs Compared with native speakers.As a major reference for Chinese EFL learners,the English-Chinese learners' dictionaries are accepted to solve problems they have.The present study aims to propose a tentative representation model of English placing verbs in ECLDs based on the lexicography mediostructure(LM)to build up a lexical-semantic relational network of English placing verbs.Levin(1993)has got some results in her study on the classes of placing verbs and their alternations.However,her study is not precise enough to reveal the relations between the verb classes and their correspondent syntactic patterns or alternations.The problem is to be solved within the conceptual frame which covers both general and specific conceptual content of various alternations,which helps to explain the semantic and syntactic features of English placing verbs.The thesis first probes into the semantic and syntactic features of English placing verbs and makes a sub-classification of those verbs.According to the correspondence of verbs and alternations,English placing verbs are classified into six categories with typical and non-typical members,proving the basis of the new representation model in ECLDs.Then the error analysis and contrastive analysis are conducted with corpora to study the use of placing verbs by Chinese EFL learners.The result indicates that Chinese learners have difficulties in the acquisition of English placing verbs which included overuse,under-use and misuse.The causes are also be analyzed.On the basis of this,the representation of placing verbs in current ECLDs and ELDs are examined to figure out the deficiencies about the treatment of placing verbs.A tentative representation model of placing verbs in ECLDs is proposed to make up those deficiencies and better satisfy the needs of Chinese EFL learners by taking learners' needs into consideration and adopting LM.