A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of English Psychological Causative Verbs:the Perspective Of The Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model

Causative structure is a key and difficult part in Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English.There has been much research on causative structure,but few people have made special research on psychological causative verbs.Chinese EFL learners have made a variety of mistakes in using English psychological causative verbs.It is important to analyze and summarize the acquisition of English psychological causative verbs by Chinese EFL learners.On the basis of previous studies,according to the vocabulary lists in junior and senior high school English textbooks,this research selected 50 English psychological causative verbs from 222 English psychological causative verbs listed by Levin(1993).Then,based on the relevant research of English psychological causative verbs in “the Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model” proposed by Zhang Jingyu(2001),this thesis uses Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA)to analyze and summarize the use of English psychological causative verbs by Chinese EFL learners from different perspectives and compare the use with that of the native speakers.The interlanguage corpus of this research is Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC)and the reference corpus is Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS).This research attempts to answer the following questions: 1)How does Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of original psychological causative verbs compare with that of affixiationalized psychological causative verbs and transformed psychological causative verbs?2)How does Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of shock-class compare with that of satisfy-class and worry-class? 3)How does Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of psychological causative verbs compare with that of their Ving As? 4)What is the relationship between the common usage of Chinese words and negative transfer of mother tongue in Chinese EFL learners' use of English psychological causative verbs? The research of question4 is with the help of i Write Baby corpus and General Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese sponsored by State Language Commission of China.Through the classification,frequency analysis and the comparison of error rates of the key words,this thesis summarizes and compares the use of key words in corpus.AndChi-square test is used to test statistical significance of the data.The results show that: 1)the acquisition of affixationalized psychological causative verbs is better than that of original psychological causative verbs,and the acquisition of transformed psychological causative verbs is the worst.2)The acquisition of shock-class is better than that of satisfy-class,and the acquisition of worry-class is the best.3)The acquisition of Ving As of psychological causative verbs is better than that of the verbs.4)The common usage of Chinese words corresponding to some English psychological causative verbs will lead to the negative transfer of mother tongue.Findings of this research offer some pedagogical implications for the teaching and studying of English psychological causative verbs.The teaching and learning of English psychological causative verbs should refer to the usage of native speakers.And teachers should pay attention to explaining the differences between the CAUSE of English psychological causative verbs and that of their corresponding Chinese words.And double identities of some English psychological causative verbs should be noted.