A Corpus-Based Study on Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition of English Psych Verb Argument Structure Constructions

Abstract

This study draws on construction grammar approach to the acquisition of English psych verb argument structure constructions by Chinese EFL learners, for which learners’ mother tongue, cognitive experience and general cognitive mechanism were selected as testing fields in the reconstruction of English form and function of psychological events. Different from previous studies of psych verb acquisition which were mainly focused on learners’ receptive knowledge, this study makes a comprehensive analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ usage of English psych verb argument structure construction in learners’ corpus (CLEC and SWECCL 2.0), in comparison with English native speaker corpus—COCA. The findings show: (1) L2 learners of all proficiency levels do not confuse the ES verb argument structure construction with that of EO verb in their usage of transitive construction, differed from previous studies; (2) the formal transparency and semantic transparency of English psych verbs and its argument construction facilitate the L2 acquisition; (3) L2 learners’ preference of the usage of resultative construction indicates the strong influence of L1, which is further proved in L2 learners’ usage of the prototypical argument construction of psych verbs.