The Acquisition Of English Causative Psych Verbs By Chinese EFL Learners

Causative psych verbs express a causing change in a psychological state,with the argument of Theme in the subject position and the argument of Experiencer in the object position.English causative psych verbs outnumber their Chinese counterparts greatly,and are rich in affixed types,while Chinese causative psych verbs are mainly compounds.The complexity of semantics,syntax and morphology as well as the cross-linguistic variation of causative psych verbs poses great challenges to second language(L2)learners.Based on the English proficiency test,word familiarity judgment task and acceptability judgment task,the current study aims to investigate the roles of semantics,morphology,first language(L1)and L2 proficiency in the acquisition of English causative psych verbs by Chinese English as a foreign language(EFL)learners.Results show that resulted from language transfer,learners have a strong preference to analytical causative form;both semantics and morphology aid the acquisition of English causative psych verbs: the former exerts an effect through L1 transfer of mutual semantic-syntactic features in the two languages,and the latter plays a role by causative affixes in English.Moreover,the two factors exert effects cooperatively,which is manifested in the fact that type 1(mutual OE & affixed type)is acquired best while type 4(exclusive TL OE & zero-derived type)is the most challenging.Besides,L2 proficiency also affects the acquisition significantly.With the improvement of English proficiency,learners can acquire causative psych verbs better.The findings support the Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model,the Interface Hypothesis and the Full Transfer/ Full Access Model.Especially,the finding of joint effort of semantics and morphology is an important supplement to the Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model.The pedagogical implications are also explored.