Effects Of Intralingual Factors And L1 Transfer On The Use Of English VACs In Chinese And Korean Learners’ L2 Production

Usage-based approaches to second language acquisition has gained momentum in the past decade on the international stage.Among the constructions under investigation,English verb-argument constructions(VACs)figures prominently.Unfortunately,this trend has not attracted much attention at home.To fill in this gap,this thesis investigates the usage of English VACs by Chinese and Korean L2 learners with comparison of the response of English native speakers,focusing on the effects of intralingual factors namely frequency,contingency and prototypicality,and crosslinguistic influence.Two tasks were administered to evaluate the use of VACs,namely a picture description task and a sentence completion task.The participants include 44 Chinese and 41 Korean learners of English and 20 native speakers.Correlations between verb generation frequency and verb frequency in that VAC in the BNC,learners’ input frequency,verb-VAC contingency and verb centrality in the semantic network of that VAC were calculated.R(R Development Core Team 2012)was used to perform statistical analyses of the results including bar chart,correlation plot and wordcloud.Differences between the performances of learners and native speakers both across the whole distribution and on an item-based level were demonstrated to indicate under-and overuse of specific items and thus to identify potential areas of L1 interference and typological influence.Corresponding to the research questions,the study has yielded the following findings.Firstly,there was significant difference in the accuracy between native speakers and learners,and the accuracy of verb choice in VACs did not have to be precisely relevant to the frequency of verb use in corpus.Besides,native speakers tended to use verbs with specific manner(e.g.,plant,introduce)while Korean learners inclined to adopt semantically bleaching verbs(e.g.,go,come).Furthermore,VACs that were more productive than others such as “V n in n” and “V n on n” suggested that they were relatively more selective in the types of verbs they allow.Four VACs with sufficient token numbers were selected for further investigation.By looking at the frequency table of the verbs used by participants,it could be argued that the verbs adopted conformed to Zipfian distribution,and the correlation coefficient showed that learners’ use of verbs in VACs was determined by verb frequency in the BNC and learners’ input frequency.Moreover,due to the statistics ?Pcw and the results of betweenness centrality and the wordcloud,the responses of the learner groups were sensitive to VAC-verb contingency and semantic prototypicality.As showed in correlation analysis between learner response and native speaker response,L1 Chinese learners’ correlation with native speakers were more homogeneous across VACs than L1 Korean learners’.Other than that,typological effect was observed in this study where both two learner groups relied more on general,highly frequent verbs and produced lower numbers of specific,less frequent verbs than native speakers did.Moreover,speakers of a verb-framed language(here Korean)produced specific manner of motion verbs less frequently and instead responded with more general motion verbs than Chinese learners.For certain VACs,learners’ semantic associations with a VAC were different from native speakers,indicating effects of collocational transfer from the learners’ L1.This study complements the existing literature of VAC acquisition and provides with evidence of Sino-Tibetan languages.On the one hand it proved the significance of language context when researching on language use where the conclusion was confirmed that usage-based approaches was applicable in classroom instruction context;on the other hand it stresses the significance of the input of prototypical exemplars as well as the interconnectedness of lexis and grammar in Chinese classroom instruction which suggest that constructions with high frequency,form-meaning contingency and prototypicality should be taught first to help form learners’ semantic network,thus to improve teaching methods in China.