Error Analysis On The Acquisition Of Causative Verbs By English Native Speakers

"Causative" is an important semantic category in the human cognitive and linguistic expression system,and is widely used in human thinking activities and linguistic communication.In Chinese,the main way of expressing "causative" is through the causative structure.English,as the most spoken language in the world,also uses the verb to express the semantics of ’causative’.Although the two languages are similar in the way they express causatives,Chinese causative verbs have strict semantic and syntactic rules,with multiple meanings and richer semantics.This linguistic phenomenon of similarity and difference poses a major problem for second language learners.Firstly,based on a review of the meaning of "causative verbs" in Chinese,this paper classifies the semantics of "causative verbs" into four categories: real verb meaning,causing meaning,making meaning and allowing meaning.By examining the BCC corpus of Beijing Language and Culture University(BLCU),we find that the four categories of meaning of the Chinese verb "Shi" appear in the Chinese native speaker corpus in descending order of frequency: to cause > real verb meaning;the four categories of meaning of the verb "Rang" appear in The four categories of meaning for the verb "Rang" appear in the Chinese native speaker corpus in descending order of frequency: to cause > to allow > to make > real verb meaning.Secondly,the frequency of the use of the different meanings of the verb "Rang" by native English speakers was calculated based on a global corpus of mediated languages and compared with that of native Chinese speakers.It was found that the use of the high-frequency and low-frequency meaning of "Shi" by native English speakers was basically the same as that of native Chinese speakers,but the use of the high-frequency meaning of "Shi" was very different from that of native Chinese speakers: native English speakers used However,the use of the high-frequency meaning of "Rang" differs greatly from that of native Chinese speakers: the use of "Rang" by native English speakers accounts for 80% of the total number of uses,while the use of "Rang" by native Chinese speakers accounts for only 38% of the total number of uses.On this basis,this paper further analyses the bias and causes of the errors in the use of "Shi" by native English speakers.The study found that there were five main types of errors among native English speakers,namely omission,misplacement,misaddition,misordering and mismatch.The causes of these errors are both internal and external.The internal factors are mainly related to the negative transfer of the mother tongue,over-generalisation of the target language and the influence of learning and communication strategies;the external factors are mainly related to the unreasonable arrangement of teaching materials(inappropriate explanation of grammar points and inappropriate practice)and the training bias caused by inappropriate practice.Finally,based on the results of the error analysis of native English speakers’ in Chinese "causative verbs",two outstanding international Chinese textbooks,HSK Standard Course and New Practical Chinese Textbook,are examined and corresponding teaching suggestions are made.The innovation of this study is to explore the multidimensional research paradigm of the corpus-based acquisition bias of international students.1.While the acquisition of "causative verbs" is mainly studied by empirical research methods such as questionnaires and interviews,this study uses a combination of a standard corpus and a learner’s corpus,which is a richer source of corpus and more objective.2.This paper compares the native Chinese corpus with the learner corpus and investigates the general trend and errors’ characteristics of the use of "Shi" and "Rang" by native English speakers,which is a better insight for Chinese teaching.