Research On Factors Influencing Chinese Learners’ Processing Of English Locative Alternation

English Locative Construction is a linguistic pattern that indicates the movement of an object or its change of state.The pattern that indicates the movement is called figure locative construction,and what indicates the change of state is called ground locative construction,represented as S V NP PP1(e.g.,Lisa poured water into the cup.)and S V NP PP2(e.g.,Bart filled the cup with water.)respectively.V is a locative verb,followed by NP,a noun phrase.PP1 is a prepositional phrase with the preposition on/onto/into,and PP2 is one including the preposition with.Semantically,S V NP PP1 means the movement of NP,while S V NP PP2 denotes the change of state of NP.Then,English Locative Alternation refers to the alternative use of figure-locative construction and ground-locative construction to make different semantic elements salient and to achieve certain communicative purposes.Chinese EFL learners sometimes make mistakes in the use of English locative construction.For example,they choose to use a structure but the real meaning they intend to convey should have been expressed by another similar structure,or they misuse figure-only verbs in the ground-locative construction and vice versa.Till now,studies on dative alternation and causative alternation are abundant,and researchers hold overgeneralization errors in these two types of constructions are the co-effect of multiple factors such as language proficiency,verb frequency,and verb semantics.In comparison,however,English locative alternation is not widely studied,and the effects of different influencing factors on its acquisition by Chinese learners have hardly been investigated.The research intends to explore how the three factors,i.e.,language proficiency,verb frequency,and verb semantics,affect Chinese learners’ processing of English locative sentences.Specifically,we study their individual effects at first,i.e.,how the three factors separately influence Chinese learners’ processing,and secondly their interaction effects,i.e.,how they make a difference jointly on the process.Moreover,based on the previous two questions,we attempt to analyze what approach Chinese learners conform to in their learning of English locative construction,the usage-based approach(affected by proficiency and frequency)or the rule-based approach(affected by verb semantics).The experiment employs the grammaticality judgement paradigm.Two groups of Chinese EFL learners with different language proficiency are required to judge English locative sentences containing alternating,figure-only,or ground-only verbs,and these verbs are of two sorts of frequency: high or low.Thus,this is a 2(language proficiency:high,low)× 2(verb frequency: high,low)× 3(verb semantics: alternating,figure-only,ground-only)mixed factorial design,with verb frequency and verb semantics serving as the within-subject factors,and language proficiency level as the between-subject factor.The judgement score for English locative sentences is the dependent variable.After collecting and organizing the test results,their scores are imported to SPSS 26 to do a series of analyses such as multi-factor analyses of variance,post hoc tests,simple effect analyses,etc.The study finds that proficiency and semantics respectively have significant main effects on Chinese learners’ judgement of English locative construction: High proficiency predicts a high score and low proficiency a low score;alternating semantics predicts a high score and figure-only semantics a low score.Besides,frequency and semantics jointly have a significant interaction effect,and they together influence their judgement: for figure-only verbs,high-frequency predicts a high score and low-frequency a low score;for low-frequency verbs,alternating predicts a higher score than figure-only,and ground-only predicts a higher score than figure-only.The influence of language proficiency and verb frequency can be explained by the usage-based approach,and the rule-based approach can explain the effect of verb semantics,and the two approaches together are able to account for the interaction effect of frequency and semantics.Therefore,the answer to the last question is that the acquisition of English locative construction by Chinese EFL learners conforms to the combined usage-based and rule-based approach of language acquisition.The findings imply that future teaching and learning of English locative construction should increase the frequency of input and output,optimize the input of explicit construction knowledge and generalize abstract construction rules of verb items,in order to achieve better learning effect.