English L2 Learners' Use Of English Verb Argument Constructions

In the past decade,usage-based approaches to SLA(Second Language Acquisition)is developing rapidly.Among all the studies,verb-argument constructions(VACs)has received considerable attention(Ellis&Ferreira 2009a,2009b).According to Talmy's division of world languages,German,Spanish and Chinese belongs to satellite-framed language,verb-framed language and equipollent-framed language respectively.However,previous studies mainly focused on L1 German,L1 Spanish learners'use of English VACs(R?mer et al.,2014a,2014b),but failed to include L1 Chinese learners.Since it is necessary for L1 Chinese learners to master the usage of English VACs,this study aims to explore the differences on the usage of English VACs among L1 Chinese,L1 German and L1Spanish learners.Hence,two questions have been put forward distinguishing these differences:(1)What are the differences between the type frequency and token frequency of verbs as well as prepositions on English VACs among the bilinguals whose native language is Chinese,German and Spanish?(2)What are the differences of the bilinguals'incorrect use of VACs in English?By adopting the contrastive interlanguage approach,this study takes TOELF11as the corpus source and 180 essays(60 for each language)with same topic have been selected from the corpus base.To ensure the accuracy of results,all these essays are proposed from the same-level authors.Through the analysis of English VACs(VL?VOL and VOO),the characteristics of language typology can be revealed.This study has coded and classified both correct and incorrect usages based on the operationalizations and criteria raised by Goldberg(2004).To extract the target construction in corpus,this study used Antconc3.5.8w as the retrieval software.By means of statistical methods like Chi-square test and Log Likelihood,the study has obtained the following two main findings:(1)In terms of verbs,the result shows that three kinds of bilinguals do not display a significant deviation among VL,VOL and VOO.In the contrast,a significant difference on verb token frequencies of VL and VOL constructions can be found while that of VOO cannot(p<o.ooo,p<o.oo1).Concerned about the use of preposition,there is no significant difference both in the type and token frequencies among three kinds of bilinguals.(2)As for the errors,L1 Spanish displays a higher error rate compared with L1Chinese and L1 German while all three kinds of bilinguals have no statistically significant differences according to the Chi-square test results(?~2=2.472,df.=2,p=0.290>0.05;?~2=4.425,p=0.099>0.05).Among the five types of errors,besides spelling errors,verb errors and preposition errors are the most frequent ones.More verb errors are committed by the L1 Chinese while more prepositions errors can be found among L1 Spanish.This study has demonstrated that there exist differences among bilinguals with different native language background in the usage of English VACs.Through the comparison on language habits of bilinguals in corpus base,the test results may help L1 Chinese to learn English VACs better,and enrich the content of such studies as well,...